


Acta Non Verba

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M, Odin's A+ Parenting, Pseudo-Incest, loki and thor cannot be trusted, thor and loki's excellent envoyage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-03 05:56:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time Taleya left this brilliant summary of a night of tumblr antics on her dash:</p><p>  <i>And lo, Thor stands magnificent and proud atop the craggy slopes of Jötunheimr’s mountains, hair blowing majestically in the chill, snow-borne wind.</i></p><p>  <i>Clutching a mangy fistful of his own frizz-blown mop, Loki can only stare at him with the sort of deep-seated hatred he normally reserves for Karaoke night in Glaðsheimr.</i></p><p>...and lo, I discovered a deep and sudden kink for Thor playing with Loki's messed-up floppy frizzy hair.</p><p>I REGRET NOTHING.</p><p><b>ETA:</b> Completely unexpected addition to the story is completely unexpected!</p><p>...I REGRET EVERYTHING.</p><p><b>ETA THE SECOND:</b> I changed the title; this was <i>All They Ever Do Is Talk</i>. Because it turned into A Real Story. Oops. Oh, <i>god</i>. Although I’d known for some time that there were three more parts to this, I figured I’d never write them. But then the Fijian sun fried my brain and…here comes the angst brigade? And I think they’re playing our song.</p><p>(The rating has been increased for the last two chapters. Because apparently the encore performance is going to be all smut, all the time. Um.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taleya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taleya/gifts).



> A few days back, I was moaning about FILTHY FANFIC FEELS I couldn't be arsed writing myself, and Taleya added to my woes with this alternate universe starting from the ill-fated trip to Jötunheimr: _Here’s one for ya: Heimdall only picks up Fandral, Sif, Hogun and Volstagg, and takes away teh hammer “YOU’RE ENVOYS NOW. LOKI, MAN UP AND STOP YOUR BROTHER FROM KILLING SHIT."_
> 
> It turned into [an entirely ridiculous back and forth of COMPLETE CRACK](http://claricechiarasorcha.tumblr.com/post/20456073318/fluffmugger-heres-one-for-ya-heimdall-only) otherwise known as _Thor and Loki's Excellent Envoyage_. For reasons best not understood I then actually tried to write a proper scene from this mystical fic of mysticalness, so while it is somewhat serious in style it's still NOTHING MORE THAN CRACK.
> 
> And yes, I REGRET **NOTHING**.

The moment they entered the small suite of rooms granted to them and the door closed at their backs, Loki pointed towards the purported bathing chambers with a steady arm. “If I am to share this miniscule chamber with you, then I expect you not to stink to high heaven while we do so,” he said with no preamble. Thor only just hid a grin.

“Was I really so unpleasant to be beside, brother? For you were not so much the better, I must remind you.”

Loki’s eyes flashed dangerous green fire, and this time Thor struggled not to laugh outright. It had driven his little brother mad, he knew, to be seated at the high table of Laufey-king while in such disarray. Both brothers had been liberally coated in sweat and in blood, refrozen snow and ash only adding to the dire stew of their shambled selves. Loki had also taken clear distaste in the state of his hair, trying to tame it surreptitiously so many times Thor had lost count. And yet it remained even now a wild darkfire corona about his pale face, glinting almost silver-blue in the pale strange half-light of Jötunheimr.

Turning from his brother’s continued glare, Thor gave the door deep thought. “But should we leave ourselves so vulnerable? Perhaps we ought to sleep in our armour.”

“Surely even you can recall the rules of hospitality, Thor. We have eaten at his table, broken his bread. Laufey-king would not encroach upon us in such a fashion now.” For all the sentiment rang true enough, the words were very wry; Loki had in fact eaten very little at the king’s table, even given his usual small appetite. The meal had not been to his taste, perhaps, though Thor himself had eaten more than enough for the both of them.

“Well, if you insist,” Thor said, not bothering to suppress a dubious note. Wrinkling his nose, Loki jerked his head in the appropriate direction.

“I most certainly do,” he said, the snarls of his hair moving in alarming shadow-patterns above his pale face. “And you go first.”

Blinking, focusing his attention back on his brother’s face, Thor couldn’t contain his surprise. “Really?”

“I want to take my time. And I will not have you bothering me when you change your mind halfway through.”

Shaking his head, Thor threw his hands into the air and went. The facilities were somewhat different to what they had on Asgard, though he made do; when he returned to the chamber, he wore only undershirt and trousers with his armour held close. He felt again the ache of deep and sudden loss; Mjölnir had been called back to Asgard while he and Loki remained behind, locked in this peculiar situation as repentance for the foolishness of but a few short hours of their long lives.

Loki did not appear to hear him come in. Seated still and silent by the small window, he held one hand before his face. The shuttered expression he wore appeared almost entirely blank. Even for Loki, master of emotion and language, it seemed unusual. The state of his hand was in itself a peculiarity; Thor had noticed the ruined gauntlet early in their banishment, though hadn’t had much time to ask after its fate. Clearly it troubled Loki now, though Thor couldn’t think that odd. They’d been a gift, weighed and fitted to suit his knife-skills and fluid fighting style.

“Don’t be so down, brother,” he said with sudden gallant optimism, crossing the room to stand at his side. “We will get you another when we return home. It will be just as fine as the one you have lost.”

“I am fine,” he murmured in reply, though it seemed more to himself in that he did not even look to Thor at all. He frowned.

“How did you lose it?” Leaning closer, Thor squinted at the pale skin of Loki’s extended forearm. “Are you hurt?”

“I am _fine_.” Closing the hand tight, dropping the arm with sharp dismissal, he craned around to look up at him. The blank look cut straight through Thor, with all the cool elegance of a fine-wrought blade of ice and winterfire.

“Loki—”

“Do not disturb me, Thor.”

As the door closed at his back, Thor supposed he could not blame Loki for his mood. It had been a peculiar sort of day even before they’d spent the last hours of it arguing relentlessly before the throne of Laufey-king. With a sigh, he flopped down upon the lone small bed, feet hanging off the edge as he stared at the peculiar stellae of the ice and stone ceiling overhead. That morning, he’d woken in Asgard knowing he would be by day’s end named heir to the All-father and lord protector of the realm of Asgard. Now, Mjölnir had been taken from his side and he was reluctant envoy to Jötunheimr in the company of his unfortunate brother.

“Truly, fate does make fools of us all,” he murmured, and a soft snort from the door made him sit up.

“I rather believe you make fool enough of yourself, Thor,” Loki added, moving across the half-darkness of their room. Thor arched an eyebrow, glad to see that at least his temper appeared to have settled somewhat since dinner.

It was a pity the same could not be said for what grew upon his head. If anything, the steam had only made it worse.

“Loki, your…”

With hand outstretched he leaned forward, curious as a child. By the sensation of his cheeks being stretched too far, he knew his smile probably made him look a child, too. Loki’s own bare hand snapped up before he could come any closer; the forbidding expression gave him a strange and sudden resemblance to their father.

“You touch my hair with those fingers, Thor, and you will shortly have no fingers with which to touch anything else at all.”

Thor dropped his hand without protest. Still he grinned so hard it hurt. “Shall you keep them as a trophy then, brother? Perhaps you might string them in your hair so I may touch it forever.”

Scowling deeper, Loki tried to smooth his hair down again. The moment his hands rose, it only rebounded back up again. “Do _not_ start with me.”

“Please,” he said, quite enchanted now; though he recalled Loki’s hair in childhood as being slightly unruly, long years of meticulous grooming meant he now felt he’d really never had any idea how _curly_ it truly was. “Please, Loki, may I touch it? It looks so _soft_.”

The pale eyes blazed, a scalded cat fresh from its bath. Then he stared at the bed. “Out.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“ _Out_. I’m taking the bed. I think I’ve earned it.”

Reclining back once more, with all limbs splayed across every available surface, Thor knew he likely resembled nothing so much as a hunting dog before the fire. “But I am the elder. I have my rights.”

Something very dark flittered through his eyes, shadow across the sun. So quick it was, Thor could not even be sure he’d seen it. “No.”

“ _No_?” Shifting again, Thor gave his brother a look as measured as it was amused. “So you’re claiming the bed-right as the baby of the family?”

“No, I claim it on the basis that you are the fool who got us into this ridiculous position in the first place.”

For a moment he considered this. Then, Thor shrugged. “I suppose on that basis, we could share.”

The stare this earned him reminded him of the forbidding cliff-faces of the plateau where the Bifröst pierced the land of Jötunheim. A moment later, Loki dropped to the bed, presenting his back to his brother.

“Fine.”

Propping himself up on the ridiculously narrow bed, Thor balanced his elbows on his knees and watched Loki continue fretting at his hair, trying not to laugh. Or reach out. The ridiculous snarls and tangles were like an invitation, filling him with the terrible urge to twist his fingers in their knotted darkness. “It’s probably a moot point, besides,” he said, more as a distraction than anything more. “One of us ought to stay on guard.”

“There is no need.”

“And you, the ever-cautious one,” Thor returned, lips curving downward. “Do you really trust the bonds of hospitality that far, brother?”

From the hunch of his shoulders, Loki had grimaced. “No. But I have warded the chamber, and it will warn us of any unwelcome or untoward incursion.” Then he half-turned, his profile regal pale grace for all the feral state of his hair. “Unless you do not trust me.”

“Of course I trust you,” he said, unable to mask his surprise. “Even with that malevolent mop growing upon your head. Might I touch it, to see if it bites?”

“You may not,” he said, slapping away his hand. “Do try to be sensible, Thor, and shut your mouth long enough to allow us both to get some sleep. You’re quite idiot enough even _with_ a full night’s rest.”

Again, Thor smothered his laughter with only the greatest of efforts. Loki had looked entirely too much like their mother in the throes of maternal disapproval when he’d spoken those words.

The bed really did prove to be ridiculously inadequate to their needs, though it had been entirely the point; for all Laufey had ostensibly accepted Odin’s sons as envoys in the wake of Thor’s disastrous incursion into Jötunheimr, it had been clear from the beginning that he meant to take as much pleasure from their situation as possible. Their forced state at the dinner and then their current accommodations were likely to be only the beginning.

Yet in the darkness of encroaching night Thor couldn’t quite resent it. For the bed to support them both they had to curl together like kittens. The thought amused him; while Loki had always insisted Thor to be a slavering hound, Loki certainly had the temperament of a cat. Yet skittish and standoffish though he was, he’d relented enough to stay in this bed with Thor invading every inch of his personal space. With his back now pressed to his chest, Thor felt his brother’s breathing steady, felt it slow. Loki slept, while Thor remained yet awake.

Unable to resist, Thor raised one hand and gently tangled his fingers in the soft black snarls of his disordered hair.

“ _Thor_ ,” Loki moaned. “I said _no_.”

“I could not help myself!”

“Which is precisely the reason why we are here.”

Ignoring that, Thor dug his fingers deeper. “It really is very soft, brother.”

“And my teeth are very sharp.”

His chuckle rumbled low in his chest. “Yes, little kitten. I was already quite aware of as much.”

The low growl in his throat only made him laugh all the harder. A moment later he tried to respect the deeply bruised dignity of his younger brother and removed his hands from his hair. Twining his arms around his middle instead, he drew him close with a frown. “You feel so cold, Loki… _are_ you cold?”

For a long moment, he did not answer. When at last he did, it was slow, almost uncertain. “Yes.”

“I’m here, brother,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I promise, it won’t last.”

He spoke true enough, for when he woke in the morning Thor did not feel the cold. The space in the bed next to him, however, was chill indeed. He sat up with a frown, but in doing so he found Loki had not strayed far. His slim tall figure stood before one of the ice-wrought walls, one of his daggers in hand while he tilted in lean contemplation. Thor frowned deeper.

“Laufey permitted me no paper,” Loki said, sudden and without turning. “I made do.”

Pushing up from the bed, Thor crossed the floor to take his place at Loki’s side. Still he did not turn to him, but Thor didn’t need to ask to see what he had done. Lists, thoughts, theories and brief snatches of history crisscrossed the wall like patchwork, a web of thought drawn directly from the clever hive of his brother’s mind.

“…Loki?”

“Yes?”

“This is all your thoughts of how to best put forward our diplomatic mission in order that we both might return to Asgard with ourselves intact, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So why is _this_ a list of how best to dismember me while ensuring the very best distribution of my resultant parts amongst the provinces of Jötunheimr?”

Loki turned to follow the accusing point of one long finger. “I was merely taking into account all possible alternatives.”

His still, serious face might have seemed a threat to anyone else. Thor very badly wanted to laugh. Instead, he reached forward again.

“ _Don’t_ touch it.”

Thor felt as if it ought to be impossible, to cradle Loki’s head so completely in even his two large hands; it was so filled with knowledge he had no idea how Loki himself bundled it all inside. Drawing his hands forward in a motion both slow and even, he smoothed the unruly hair down one last time. “Every little helps, yes?”

As Thor drew back Loki made a sound rather like a cat being squeezed, and one rightly furious about it. Then a hand flashed out, swiped across the wall. In its wake the ice melted, refroze. The writing carved into the ice was gone.

“I hadn’t had a chance to read that!”

“I think you have already aptly demonstrated that your input was not required,” Loki replied, dry as desert dust. “So let us go, then.”

“It’s going to be a long day,” Thor agreed soberly. “But don’t concern yourself too much. My perfect hair more than makes up for diplomatic disaster of yours.”

Again, his glare would not have looked out of place upon the face of a feline with arched back and hissing breath. Biting back a laugh, Thor shook his head. “But I am glad.”

“For your ambassadorial hair?”

“That it’s you,” he said, and Loki’s withering expression half-froze in the face of Thor’s easy gladness. “Here with me, I mean. I dread to think what might have been, were you not by my side to prevent me from making my own idiot actions so much the more foolish.”

For the longest moment, the silver tongue stayed silent. “Yes,” he murmured finally, “yes, I rather dread to think myself.” When he held his hand out it stood stark against the blue hues of Jötunheimr, pale and cool without its cradling Asgardian gauntlet. “Come then, brother. We have much work to do.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Loki's side of the story comes somewhat to light, but more to shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I...had never quite intended to write more of this. It's not even a proper story, as such. It's just that every so often when I see gifsets of Loki and his FLOPPY JOTUNHEIMR HAIR I end up spazzing out over this crazy scenario, and...well, I felt the urge to give Leya some more of it. Because I rarely write from Loki's POV -- with good reason, being that _I always get him wrong_ \-- I figured I might as well give him some words of his own.
> 
> It got entirely out of hand. 
> 
> So, yes. I have to warn y’all, that this story really has no point. Basically my harddrive is a graveyard where words go to die, and while my original words will likely always rot there, unexhumed and forgotten, at least with fic I can dig up the little corpses I planted and display them for all and sundry to see.
> 
> …wow. That really didn’t come across as creepy at all, did it?

“So,” Loki began, unutterably calm. “That went particularly well.”

In contrast, Thor was all storm and sword, unarmed though he was within the chambers of Laufey’s lesser guests. His boots had already worn a deep path into even the marbleised ice, blunt fingers in hard fists at the level of his hips as he paced relentless. “I will not leave without you,” he said, proud head unbent, the fury of his berserker spirit unbroken even in such temporary mocking exile.

And of course he spoke as if his declarations were as eternal as the ice that encased the heart of the alien world he thundered against. Yet that same cold was silent within Loki, thrumming up through the frozen ground and through his feet to whisper through blood and bone that his beloved brother was wrong, so very wrong to think Loki should be taken from this place. Even as Thor railed on, it expanded through Loki like questing growing crystal, spreading from trunk to arms like unfurling sapling branches, finally coming to tingling end in the uneasy shift of fingertips. Then, in place of juxtaposition in his mind, the silent song of Jötunheimr took true root: his clever quicksilver mind overwritten in the crystallised geometrical pattern of cold thought and ice-riddled purpose.

“Loki?” Thor’ dire frown echoed the way his entire body vibrated with the frustration and ever-fury of the god named Thunder. “Loki, why do you look at me so? You are coming home with me, or I shall stay. We will not be parted.”

And Loki was still, Loki was silent. In Asgard, he had always thought he’d never known true warmth, and that only because his brother had always been golden brilliant heat — how could even the all-burning sun hope to compare with such glory of divine flesh and blood? But as Loki stood before him at that moment, his shadow tainted blue and cool, he thought perhaps he had just never known truly what it is to be cold.

Undeterred by Loki’s lack of answer, Thor stepped forward with his hands falling upon his shoulders. Loki immediately ducked back beneath their weight; though his arms crossed in what he hoped appeared as annoyance, but knew Thor would likely recognise it as something closer to defensiveness.

“I would suggest you do not touch me.”

“Why not?” His generous mouth downturned but to his credit, despite his words, he did not immediately reach out again. “I will touch you if I please.”

Though Loki only smiled on the outside, internally his laughter rocked him to his very deepest centre. How to explain such a thing, to one such as Thor? _I am cursed_. It was the only explanation for what had happened, both then and now. Loki could not understand otherwise why Odin Allfather had called home only his wayward heir, leaving the expendable second son in his place. A shiver rocked through him, sudden and silent – perhaps it had it been the suggestion of Laufey-king, and the Allfather had been only too eager to have back the golden son, the precious heir. While both his sons created their fair share of troubles at least Thor did so out in the open and with clear action, rather than in the shadows and with sly spoken word of tarnished silver.

“It would be better if you did not,” he said finally, cold, and Thor rolled his eyes to the dim blue heavens above the grey-cloud sky of Jötunheimr.

“Is this about your hair?”

“This has nothing to do with my hair!” The words exploded out of him with all the force of a supernova, hands balling into fists to match Thor’s own. “For Norn’s sake, Thor, can you not realise how _deep_ we are in this?”

“Together.” Stubborn as an ox, broad as one too, Thor set his jaw and held his shin high. “We shall be in this _together_. Do you remember nothing of last night?”

It had been a mistake. But then Loki had been so deeply confused and so very _cold_ that the close company of his brother had been welcome distraction from the cacophony of thought that had threatened to undo even the fine ordered lines of his clever mind. Even when the great boor had insisted on tangling his fingers in already tangled hair, digging deep in ways that hurt, it had only made him happy. Perhaps because they did.

But there was something wrong with him. Thor might not realise it – Loki had no illusions as to what his brother could be expected to know outside the narrow limits of his own thoughts – but their father must have. It made no sense otherwise.

Not that anything seemed to have made sense from the moment Thor had turned the tables on him, the overturned banquet table spilling forth mead and fruit and bread like mocking laughter of vanished glory before them both.

_But you are coming with me…aren’t you?_

Loki shoved aside memory, cleaved to relevant thought as he considered again the Allfather’s action. Yes, why _else_ would he leave him here? Surely he had seen the mark of the curse upon him, whether by the gift of Hliðskjálf or by the word of loyal Heimdall. But it was hard to judge true, given Loki did not know himself its nature. Jötunn sorcery had never been something easily made study of; the libraries of Asgard had little to say, and what few tutors with anything to teach him had said lesser still. Certainly the uneasy peace between the two realms had not allowed even the Prince Royal to send for aid from Jötunheimr herself.

And with a grimace he thought again of the warrior dead by his blades, in side and in heart. There had been nothing about the hulking creature to suggest him any sort of sorcerer. Perhaps, then, he had been a thrall, mere vector of the curse that had taken root first in skin, and now in the cold lump of his heart. It still gave him no clue as to its source, though he could not deny it might have been Laufey-king himself. And with such toy in hand, would it be so strange that he now wished to keep it?

 _And you, Father – would you be all too pleased to be rid of me to another world?_ The thought ate at him like acid, ravenous, dissolving illusion in the way he could banish mirrors of himself with one careless slide of a hand, open-palmed slap against reality itself. It would be best to leave the damaged one, to call home the true son; Loki could not argue with such logic. Taking another step back, Loki held his own head high with false smile. For such a thing to be worthwhile Loki knew that Thor must be well, that Thor could not be burdened in the same fashion. Heimdall’s words were true and strong in both memory and in mind:

_Be warned, I shall uphold my sacred oath to protect this realm as its gatekeeper. If your return threatens the safety of Asgard, my gate will remain shut and you will be left to perish on the cold waste of Jötunheimr._

Even as Thor ranted on, Loki cast his mind back to that first true audience with Laufey, and the weight of those watchful red eyes on his. In his curiosity, fixed more upon him than even his golden brother, they had not been so cold. Instead he’d noted heat there, his body inclining forward as if to lay one great hand upon the bare Aesir-pale skin revealed by his fallen gauntlet. Loki shuddered again to remember him: the beneficent spider, who in the name of false peace now allowed them to walk the steady silk of his great web, inviting them closer to both the centre and to the strands coated with tacky death.

 _It was so easy to think them the insects when so far_ , he thought, hands reflexively clenching, loosening. _Yet now we are the ones so small, left to our own fates in this place._

And still he was so cold, even as he felt nothing at all. Drifting away from his brother Loki moved to the window, found himself looking out over the dull courtyard below. There could be no beautiful view worth any such effort, not from this room. He might have said so aloud, if not for knowing Thor would only scoff. What beauty, he would say, could ever be found in such a fallen kingdom?

Yet Loki had seen beauty faded and shrouded in the disgrace of age and defeat. It had been the first time he had set foot upon Jötunheimr, almost a full turn of the moon ago – Sif had had the right of it. _It is forbidden!_ And even Loki Liesmith, Loki Silvertongue, Loki the Learned and Loki the All-Curious, had never dared break the Allfather’s edict. Or rather…he had never _wished_ to. And in the end he had told himself always it was only because he saw no use in a broken bleeding world, with the heart of its true sorcery and spirit locked beneath Asgard itself. There could be nothing for him, for his quick and curious fingers and quicker mind, in such a shamed world.

It had not been fear, he insisted to his own mind in numerous ways, that had turned his attention from the ice realm. And yet he had felt fear, slipping in the secret ways of Yggdrasil to slide through the star-shroud of Ífingr and across to the land beyond. In the end such journey had left him just a shadow himself, feet half-encased in the snow as he moved to the outpost with a message meant for the tilted ear of Laufey-king.

In the end he had not ever spoken with the king himself. He had never intended it. All he had wanted was to give the information and the way, and trust that twisting even such a small knife in an old wound would open it enough to let the festering pus leak free. And oh how it _had_. And now he was here, unintended and unprepared, even as he still twisted the tables upon which all games were played. But then, that was what Loki had been raised to be: the player in shadow, secret gamemaster no other knew both held and shredded the rulebook hidden in one long dark sleeve.

 _No-one knew it was I, who brought that secret to this place_. _They cannot recognise me. No,_ _no-one at all knows my face except as the son of the Allfather, second and lesser always to the golden first_.

Yet the very land beneath his feet seemed to murmur otherwise. Loki could still feel it now as he had felt it then: the probe of half-drowsing magics, reaching unseen tendrils from deep with the frozen ground to caress lightly over and under his Aesir skin.

And he shuddered, shouldering the memory aside. _I am a sorcerer. This is a land given to such things – or had been, once._ Perhaps it merely had felt the echo of the Casket upon him. But then he had never touched the damnable thing. Their father had never allowed it, though Loki could not quite resent the denial of something he had never even asked for. Yet he’d always felt its allure. It was simply that the curiosity he’d felt about his father’s greatest spoil of war had been to him much the same as Jötunheimr itself: something had simply forever said, soft and insistent, _this is not for you_.

But now the land beneath his feet whispered with gleeful truth, _now you are for me!_

“Loki?” His brother’s hand fell upon his shoulder before he had the sense to knock it free, to pull away. “Loki, have you not been listening to me?”

“I can’t imagine you have said much beyond the usual posturing,” he said, plucking the hand free as he might a speck of dust. Thor’s disgust caught in his throat in a rough snort.

“Are you _angry_ with me?” Disbelief was already segueing into fury – and Loki knew that Thor liked that. The idea of battle was familiar and dear to him: something to throw himself against, in order that he might fight to claim his victory in lightning and in blood. And Loki could not deny that his own blood roused itself to sudden heat at the thought. He himself needed something to rant and rail about, a physical wall to beat his fists against. Thor would always give that to him. No-one else could forget his seiðr, but Thor, when moved, could be drawn to treat his brother as he would any other warrior come to spar. Only he had ever been capable of seeing beyond the outer shells of lean body and silver tongue and devious mind and an ergi’s sorcery. Only Thor had ever bothered to look to the coiled shade within.

But then he would always forget, sooner or later. Just like everybody else.

“Do you not wish for Mjölnir?” he asked, retreating behind the defence of bitter knowledge, knowing the love his brother held for the damned hammer. He’d desired her from the moment he’d first seen her. There had been no fascination with the glowing Casket, not for Thor, not even when their father had spoken of its dark and shadowed history. For him it had always and ever been the gleam of her uru-head with captured star-death flickering in the runed depths, carolling to even his childish brain to the marching beat of warsong and glory.

Yet Thor surprised him. “Mjölnir will wait for me,” he replied, great shoulders moving in easy shrug. “And how could I claim myself worthy of her, knowing you languished in Jötunheimr just so I might heft her once more?”

Though his breath caught as if Thor had actually pushed at him with the damned hammer, Loki caught his surprise in the snare of his scornful smile. “You could bring her back to me,” he suggested, careless in the careful way that could only be a lead and a leash upon his brother’s exposed throat. “You could lay waste to the whole of the castle and carry me home, slay yonder dragon to earn the hand of your fair maiden.”

“You would make a fetching maiden should I put you in a dress, no doubt,” Thor said, oddly thoughtful, “but I should think you to be even fiercer than the Lady Sif in such form. It would be a great and foolish man indeed, to think he had earned recompense for rescuing that which could save itself.” Again he paused, as if he had truly discovered the point of considering words before he blurted them in senseless noise to all and sundry. “Besides, isn’t that what brought us here in the first place? My swinging my hammer without thought to consequence or true purpose?”

The hardening lump in his throat choked him just as surely as the harsh emotion he kept smothered beneath it, holding it back from rising, from spilling free from the faint tremor of his lips. Thor did not appear to notice, going on with his hand thrown up in solid disbelief.

“And you truly would be a poor maiden in distress, Loki. Anyone who sought to keep you prisoner would soon find you were only and always exactly where you wanted to be.”

Though he snorted, it was only because they both knew it to be true. The scorn also helped him to find his voice once more, even and easy. “Then why don’t you trust me?”

“I don’t trust myself.” Even as Loki frowned, opened his mouth, Thor went on undaunted; he always wore honesty well, its simplicity matched well to his soul. “Because if I do have Mjölnir in hand again, the simple fact is that I will do nothing else before I return for you.” Even as Loki’s heart began to coil in upon itself, again he laughed as if life could actually be so implausibly uncomplicated. “And to be frank, brother mine, your hair is far too ridiculous to allow you ever to pass as a maiden fair. It simply will not do.”

His eyes burned. “You truly are that great fool of whom you spoke.”

And Thor’s grin consumed like the heat of a blazing sun. “And so I shall stay with you, yes?”

“ _Fool_.”

Thor only laughed louder, the hand clapped again upon his shoulder dragging him ever forward. “Come,” he said in cheerful conviction, “I must tell Laufey-king and the Allfather of my decision!”

Loki knew his feet would drag all the way to the Bifröst site. With it came strange yearning, caught in the remembered image of the rainbow bridge stretching all the way from the observatory back to the great golden gates of the city. Then, there would always be Asgard beyond: dizzying, bright, eternal. The mere thought of it hurt his eyes even in the safeguard of memory and distance.

And there come other memories, too close on the heels of its shining centre. Loki’s mind resonated with the true harmonics of the bridge, brought to life beneath the patterned step of his careful feet. While it whispered for all those who walked its shimmering path, there were ways of making it sing. Loki knew those ways. Once, long ago, Thor had wished to endear himself in the eyes of Sif upon that very bridge with that very skill. It was only natural that he sought such knowledge from a master of both of obscure, and the obvious.

 

_“I had thought it would be so much simpler than this!”he said at last, tight form wreathed in bonded frustration. As he stepped back Thor yanked his hands free, and glared at his brother like Loki was to be blamed for everything._

_And while Loki would have been content enough to take the blame for such fallacy had it truly been his idea, he was but a mere cog in this mad machine. So he smiled, amusement bleeding through the false mask of his kind pity._

_“Oh, and have you not realised the dangers of thinking yet, brother mine? Peculiar, given your recent behaviour would only suggest otherwise.”_

_“How could it be so very dangerous? **You** think all the time!” Thor snapped with the careless strength of a whipcrack, and Loki only half-bothered to hold in his laughter._

_“I have the skill for it. You do not.” Taking an easy step backward Loki’s eyes lowered to take in Thor’s feet, set wide and defiant. Loki’s smirk grew only all the wider. “As you have not the skill for the dance, it seems.”_

_Following his brother’s gaze down, Thor’s face coloured with the bastard child of annoyance and humiliation. “It should be easier than this,” he muttered, though when he shuffled one foot it seemed to be made of weighted lead. “It is not so different, from the pattern of the warrior forms. I am master of those, why does this then defeat me so?”_

_“Because you are not fighting a battle.”_

_“Of course I am.” With hands upon his hips, free of Mjölnir’s familiar weight though they were, his dire frown could only be that of a princely warrior taking his army into the shrieking welcome of war. “Sif will not bow to my charms without my waging war upon her sensibilities, brother. I must earn the right to claim her hand.”_

_“And knowing that, still you think to charm her in the way of a swooning maiden?” Loki had long since decided against teasing out the true process of Thor’s more noble thought-cascades, but even this was beyond the pale of the worst he had already seen. Running a hand back through his hair, he added lightly: “Better you should give her a new pair of gauntlets, or have an artisan craft a crest for her shield. Do you truly think she would be romanced by gestures of hollow romance?”_

_“But look!” One hand reached out, carved a rich arc across the star-hung sky above and below and all around. “Such a view! How could she not be awed, held in my arms as she looks upon the glory of the realm that will be mine to rule?”_

_“She has seen it before,” Loki pointed out, all half-exasperated pity. “And it says not much for you, that you must resort to tricks and illusion to win her heart. Is that not more my place than yours?”_

_The scowl alone would have been answer enough. “Just teach me.”_

_“Ah, but I think you cannot be taught.” And he danced further back upon light feet, the song of the kaleidoscope wrought easy and true beneath each careful careless step. Thor’s brow furrowed, eyes swift as he marked each footfall, and still found his observation wanting. When Loki stilled he looked up, expression direr still._

_“How do you **do** that?”_

_His shrug was as innocent as his grin – that was to say, a thin mask over his true glee. “I cannot teach you. We are done here. But take my advice, brother – seek her out in ways that mean something to her, and use not the false panderings of song and story. You have greater chance of victory, in that.”_

_Loki turned to go, feet in light song upon the shifting colours beneath. But Thor’s hand moved tight about his wrist, held him still, song cut off in rising fermata. When he looked back, eyebrow raised, he found his brother’s expression halfway to fury. “Then why did you bother to play at this mockery for this long? If you knew she wouldn’t care, if you knew I would fail?”_

_With nothing more than that raised eyebrow Loki conveyed a full flyting’s worth of scorn, if one might judge such things by the crystallisation of rage across Thor’s face. Yet he was not one for words, only action. And his movement was sudden, too sudden for even Loki to react in time enough. In a moment Loki was on his back with a discordant slam for accompaniment, Thor’s greater bulk weighing him down. It was upon his lips to say it was the wrong kind of music, out of tune and out of time, but Thor spoke first, always the lead instrument even in their tiny orchestra of two._

_“I want an answer, Loki.”_

_Demands had always meant little and less, particularly when performed in so inelegant a fashion. In return he simply drummed his fingers. The burgeoning quicksilver gleam of his smile quirked his lips upward even as Thor’s curved ever further downward while the song sang light and mocking beneath his clever hand. There could be no answer when there was none to give._

_And apparently even his fool brother had learned something. But he could not admit it, not all at once. Instead he learned close, he leaned down, eyes searching. And the bridge sang beneath him, as it had beneath his feet while he had moved in quicksilver accompaniment to his brother’s clumsy lead, hands uneasy upon waist and shoulder as his brother sought to seduce Sif’s imagined form while failing utterly with the brother he held instead._

_And when Thor spoke, his voice trembled with the approach of oncoming storm. “This lesson is over.”_

_So like his brother, always with the last word. But Loki had the last laugh given he stayed on the bridge, eyes filled with the heavens as his fingers danced out a secret tune not even Heimdall could ever hope to truly hear._

 

“My pride and my will brought him to this place – and so I will not allow him to suffer punishment alone and in my stead. If he stays, then so too shall I.”

What was it like, Loki wondered, to be so stubbornly brilliant? He’d known Thor’s bright obduracy his entire life but even now it surprised him still, as his shining golden brother stood obstinate before the Jötunn king and refused to call the Bifröst. In turn its gatekeeper was unmoved, the skies unparted by the approach of the bridge. In the continued darkness of Jötunheimr’s perpetual half-night, flanked by royal guard, Laufey’s eyes remained watchful and red over all. Again, Loki had to think such colour to be a terrible juxtaposition; it was like flame, when all of the thick hide and bulging muscle above and below was deep cool blue, runed with swirl and sharp arabesque, like ice brought to living battle.

Those eyes moved to rest on him. The weight in them brought a wince invited; ever since childhood, Loki had always heard laughter in the dance of fire-flame. Nothing else could be so unburdened, nothing else could take all and give so little back but ember and then cold ash. And, too, it kept him warm even when he did not know what cold was. He had always loved fire, much as he had and always would love his blazing brother.

Yet for all it repulsed him, he could not look away from the sudden fire of Laufey’s eyes. It burned like fire that needed no fuel, and his voice the rasp of ice upon the rock of distant ages as he spoke at last. “If the Allfather wishes his sons to be the tender of peace between realms, who I am to object?” And despite the immovable frost of his vast body, Loki saw the laughter in his eyes. “Then the both of you stay, and let us see what we might learn of one another.”

It was but a vague mirror of what had already been said that morning, at the audience of the Odinsons and the King of Jötunheimr. _No, I have little use nor need of you both – and certainly not when the foolhardiness of Asgardian pride will surely soon demand its golden child back, for all it is the Allfather who left him here. No, we shall invite the second to stay, the dark and clever one, they name you – oh, yes, we have heard tell of you even in these cold-vaulted chambers of blue ice, Silvertongue. Perhaps you have a tale for us, a jest? Tricks, they speak lowly of in your golden halls. But we have been so long unamused by your kind, perhaps you shall provide diversion enough for us now_.

Considering it once more, Loki had to admit that this noble idiocy could be as simple as Thor taking offense at his brother being cast as mere skald in an enemy court, the jester half-hearted and tamed. But now they were both tarred by the same brush, returning to Laufey’s palace as one with the Bifröst unopened and silent in their wake and no further word from the Allfather. His silence was his agreement, though Loki’s own was simple seething resentment.

And it should have been humiliation enough that his brother would not leave him to the realm alone. But when they returned to their small room a servant, oddly long and lean where every other frost giant they have seen held the bulk of a warrior, said in low voice that other chambers had been prepared for their continued stay.

“At this stage there is but the one, for we had thought only to continue to entertain the most august person of Loki Odinson,” it added, and Loki never would have thought such creatures capable of sarcasm had he not been hearing it himself, “but we shall arrange another room for your Asgardian preferences.”

“No.” His brother spoke with the easy arrogance bred into his very bones. “We shall share.”

“Thor—”

“We shall _share_ ,” he said, and he did not even look to him as his eyes bored instead into the bowed head of the servant. Yet every word was meant for Loki alone. “Brother, I have made my decision.”

And the servant appeared to have accepted it, already lowering into a bow and then disappearing from the chamber. Loki pursed his lips, kept his mouth shut until the heavy door had swung closed in the peculiar creature’s wake. It was already too late, given Thor had already set to exploring in a manner that could not help but remind him of distant games of babyhood.

In no mood to seek him out, Loki crossed his arms, then crossed the room. Before the window, strange frosted crystal that felt as ice when he chanced a finger upon its thickness, Loki waited. A bare moment later it came, the heavy footfall of a thousand years of fraternity.

“What was that in aid of?” he asked, all cool query; even though he made no movement to turn, Thor spoke with sharp command.

“Wait there a moment.” Then, a fresh weight fell upon his shoulders; as he started, his brother followed his action with a low hum of satisfaction. “Ah! Not too big at all, even upon your skinny little frame!”

Presenting his back to the window and the realm beyond, Loki turned to give his brother first a baleful look, and then looked to what he had given him: a great fur monstrosity, called “coat” in only the loosest sense of the Asgardian term. When he looked up again, fingers tracing over coarse dappled hair with cynical curiosity, Thor beamed brighter still.

“Are you still cold?”

The easy confidence might have encouraged him to kick his brother low in the shin, if not for the jagged edge of vulnerability to the smile that curved up as far as his searching eyes. _There is love and there is loss, in this place_ , Loki thought, vague and out of tune with the continued low whisper of Jötunheimr beneath his shifting feet.

 _And longing, too_. His heart lurched sideways, both gladdened for and resentful of the bullheaded notions that had kept Thor here when by all rights he should be gone. And as Thor recognised that, smile at last brightening to full blaze, Loki’s heart stuttered, held still. There was something else here, something _deeper_ , coiled low in his abdomen. Unacknowledged, unwatered, unfed, such a seed could not grow, he told himself. He would not think of it, for it did not, would not ever matter.

_Then why does it blossom, even before you believe it to have sprouted?_

Resolute, Loki turned away from that sly voice, turned away from _him_ , and looked blindly to the great window upon the room’s furthest side.

“We are not children any longer,” he said, distant in manner if not in heart. He felt as much as heard his brother’s troubled frown, the one he always wore when Loki’s words were not the simple sincerity his own always chose to be. Then, with the split second change of sudden storm, Loki knew his brother smiled again and how he _wished_ he had something to throw at his stupid head.

“No,” Thor replied with careless confidence, “no, we are brothers.”

“And so we must share everything, always?” he asked, tugging the fur closer; Thor’s answer prefaced itself with a low chuckle born from somewhere dreadfully close to his too-great heart.

“Isn’t that what we were born for?”

 _And yet the throne I pulled out from under you is not something ever to be shared._ Loki bit down on the bitter thought with blunted teeth, and still felt it bleed. It was not that he had ever truly wanted it. No, he had only taken umbrage at the absurdity of Thor being given it merely by right when the Allfather must have known he was not ready for such responsibility. Yet it came to him so easily, as did so much of what he owned so carelessly; such gifts of privilege and purpose had always been heaped at his golden feet, even if not yet deserved.

_Like my love for you. You could be ten times the fool you already are and still you could take my love and have it a thousand years more, and all because you are **Thor**._

Loki swallowed the thoughts half-whole, unable to hold them any longer; half choked upon their substance, he risked an arch glare towards his brother. “You have responsibilities at home.”

“There is no home without you.” Loki stiffened, but there was no time to hide the movement; Thor crossed the room, hands upon his shoulders, leaning so close his breath tickled warm and true against his cheek. “And besides – did you really expect me to return to Asgard and tell Mother of how I had left you to yourself amongst the Frost Giants?” And his laughter shivered like emerging spring across chill skin. “Call me foolhardy, call me brash – and how you do! – but even _I_ am not quite that unwise.”

“You might have fooled me,” Loki returned, half-strangled still – and Thor laughed, true and booming; at such short distance, it very nearly hurt, and not just for its rich sound.

“Oh, I very much doubt _that_.”

Everything of sense told him to pull back. Yet he had spent enough time in his brother’s orbit to understand the futility of such a gesture. Instead he stood still even as Thor looked up, frowned. A moment later, Loki realised: the unmelted snow in his hair appeared to fascinate Thor. He reached forward, though he did not touch. It was strange delicacy indeed, coming of a god Loki knew to be far more blunt of intent under most other circumstance.

Then, when he looked down, his broad face was so split by his gladness that Loki’s heart ached as if pummelled black and blue by both of those great fists. His brother had always been the stronger of them both. Loki just wondered why it had taken him so very long to know by how very much, even as his heart struggled to beat around the bruise and brilliance of the easy gift of his brother’s love.

“Your hair will just have to await its liberation.” Then he was truly reaching for him, one hand moving to its accustomed place with fingertips brushing the base of his skull and thumb in loose pressure near pulse beneath jaw. Loki finally pulled away.

“Stop it.”

“Why do you pull back from me?” The dire frown was only prelude to battle, for he stepped forward, and even as Loki poised for flight he knew not where, the great arms curved around him, held tight.

“I will stay with you,” he murmured, lips surely tasting the snow in his hair, “so, stay with me.”

They often stood close together – it was inevitable, given Loki was Thor’s most constant shadow, more true than even that cast by the changing light of sun and stars and moons and distant planets wound about Asgard like a pearled necklace. Yet such embrace was rare. For all Loki claimed to be sufficient unto himself, he yearned for such – though never more than when it was so surely in his grasp. Even as he told himself to let go, he told himself too that if he was cursed, surely were he to pass this curse on to his brother it would have happened the night before, when they had slept curled together like forgotten children strayed far from their empty beds.

Loki’s arms tightened, pressed closer. They had been away from Asgard for long enough that its scent and taste should not linger still about his brother, but he carried it with him, that promise of summer eternal. Pressing his chin beneath his jaw, he sighed. _Can I just stay here?_ he whispered, but only in mind.

Thor let go first, stepped back with a peculiar expression on his face. Indeed, his eyes were averted as he said with odd, unbalanced quiet: “I will bathe before dinner – unless you wish to be first?”

Loki wore his own unease like armour, staring at him with shuttered eyes even as his fingers clenched into fists and wished to be anchored again against the hard strength of his brother’s familiar body. “Do as you will. I will wait.”

Thor reached forward, hand curled into accustomed place between the strong line of Loki’s jaw, the vulnerable curve of his throat. “We will win this, brother,” he said, fingertips pressing deep as he punctuated it with the smallest pull forward. “How could we not? I am your pawn, and this realm is your gameboard. I have faith in your skill.”

“Good.” But even as Loki smiled he hid the truth, folding it low in the cold shadows of his own heart: he did not know this gameboard. And after Thor had gone he stood again in the window, thoughts shifting like sands of an hourglass. It was at least a much better view – suited more to a prince than a skald half-heartedly brought to sing his songs by the smaller hearth.

There came a soft tap upon the door, its strange pattern somehow familiar. It seemed a melody above the harmony of Jötunheimr’s song beneath his feet. It sent a shiver through bone, nerve and blood, but his voice was clipped and strong when he called: “Enter!”

The servant of before had returned, expression as neutral as its alleged gender. On the tail of that thought Loki realised with a jolt he did not truly know the castes and classes of Jötunn society. When they had been spoken of in Asgard it had always been cruel tales of the warriors, the monsters of children’s nightmares. And somehow, he had never cared to think beyond that.

_Why? When everything else you wished to know was done, why did you never turn to Jötunheimr?_

“When the third sun eclipses the west, dinner shall be in the hall.”

Breaking his thoughts like thin ice, the servant indicated the peculiar horologium near the door. Loki followed the hand, frowned, and then nodded his understanding of the unfamiliar device. “We will attend upon Laufey-king at the appointed hour.”

“So it shall be.” Duty discharged, the servant bowed low, awaiting dismissal.

Loki didn’t know what drove him. One hand shot out, caught the creature about one cold wrist. The servant started, head snapping up. Loki let go, and a moment later his hand was sheathed once in the too-long sleeves of the coat Thor had draped about him.

Yet the servant could not help but stare at that which could not be seen, words startled, wary. “Such action is…inadvisable. Our touch is anathema to your kind.”

“Oh, I apologise,” he said, insincere and yet somehow deeply amused by the wariness of the creature. Thralls would not be so forward in Asgard, even in so peculiar a situation. “I was curious. Yet I am a sorcerer – do not fear the wrath of your king for ills tendered his guests. You have done me no harm.”

For all his easy words his fist clenched, shaking with exertion beneath the heavy fur of a creature he could not even name. But his words were even, his smile thin ice as he inclined his head to the door.

“You can go now.”

With a pause that would have been just a fraction too long for an Aesir thrall, the servant turned, head bowed, and moved away. The door clicked closed in its cold wake, and only then did Loki lift his hand, sleeve falling back over narrow wrist to reveal what lay beneath.

A blue hand, clenched as if holding the curse with every mind to throttle it. With a hissing breath Loki opened it, palm upturned towards the unseen clouded sky beyond Laufey-king’s frozen walls. As he watched it was as it had been in the heat and ice of battle: Aesir-pale skin bleeding through the blue, obliterating the whorls and whirls of a Jötunn’s markings writ across his trembling flesh like condemnation even as they were superseded. And once again Loki Odinson wore the pale skin of a seiðmaðr, coward of sorcery rather than warrior of sword.

He let his hand fall, and moved to the window, and for the longest time saw nothing at all.

“Loki?” The voice moved in uneasy ripple across the chill air of even this Asgardian-wrought room. Loki had no inkling as to how long he had waited, or even that he had been truly waiting at all, even as his brother’s great hands adjusted again the skin of the nameless ice-creature over his stiff shoulders. “Loki, have you become cold, again?”

_So golden and warm, brother mine; why do you ask such foolish questions?_

“No, Thor.”

 _I have always been silver, and so very very cold_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the two princes take a walk. A Long Walk. One thinks that They May Be Some Time. [cough]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, though I was aware when I posted the second chapter that there was a) more to the story and b) that it would likely take the form of three additional chapters, I didn't actually think I would _write_ any of it.
> 
> Then I went to Fiji and proceeded to do so. I'd have posted it from there, as it's all finished, but on the third day in McAfee tried to update their programmes and ended up fucking everyone's internet access, and I've only fixed it since getting home. NICE JOB, MCAFEE. But...here's the first of three additional chapters. Don't worry, the rest shall be soon forthcoming...

The cold ate at his bones, ravenous with some unspoken fury he did not think his Asgardian soul could ever hope to know. He hunched forward, head bent as if to break the wind apart like a bow wave. In contrast Loki stood tall and unmoveable at his side. It almost made him smile – how like him to refuse discomfort, to shrug it aside if it dared threaten his precious dignity.

“This is a fool’s errand,” Thor growled as he worked his fingers against the strap of his pack, and Loki’s snort had strength even to rise even over the howl of the wind.

“Then how well suited to it you are, brother mine.”

“But I wasn’t even supposed to be here.” His boot caught on a half-concealed rock in the white uphill path before them; only reflex kept him from falling. “This was to have been your task alone.”

He knew immediate it had been a mistake to have said so; his brother’s lips, oddly unweathered whereas Thor’s had long since chapped to the point of burn, settled in a hard line. “I have said before that you were under no obligation to remain in this place.”

“No obligation, perhaps, but for that of my heart.” Loki did not dignify even such sincerity with an answer, and he scowled even as it opened the cracks of his lips anew. “Why will you not believe me? I stayed for _you_.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” The staff he carried drove into the next drift with undue viciousness; what harm had the land done Loki, that they had not invited by coming here as they had? “Let us keep moving.”

For someone who had complained so often of the cold of Jötunheimr, Thor felt Loki was surviving this discomfort far better than he. If the cities had seemed half-ruined, the backcountry could only be named a suffering a thousand times worse. The storms of ice and hail were something beyond Thor’s control or coaxing; perhaps that would have been true even had he Mjölnir to hand.

Despite the bitterness of such knowledge, Thor could accept the wondering respect that followed close upon its heels. In that he supposed this was what his father had wanted: not only for his headstrong eldest son to know vulnerability for his own sake, but to feel the harsh responsibility of knowing his own foolhardiness had placed his brother in such danger. Thor set his jaw, kept moving. There was little enough he could now do to atone for it – save, perhaps, for remaining always at his brother’s side. No matter how irritating Loki’s short temper was beginning to prove.

“I am sorry, brother.”

He hadn’t thought the words loud enough to be heard, but then his Loki had always had an ear for that which had not been intended for him. “I do not need your apology,” he returned, sharp as the sleet that had made their morning such misery. Then he paused, though only in speech and not action. “I need your co-operation.”

Thor remained in constant motion behind him, always just out of immediate sight, but he thought Loki would know he nodded. Then, he turned his full attention back to the effort of trudging along to keep pace. After four days upon the road that grew ever harsher the further from the capital they ranged, he had come to realise there was very little he had to offer Loki. This was truly Loki’s task; it was why he had been asked to stay, and why his own presence had not been needed even as Loki worked penance for Thor’s transgression.

The guilt of that hung heavy about his neck, dragging him down even as he fought onward through the thick snow. But it had been ridiculous than anyone could ever have thought otherwise – as if he would ever have been able to leave Loki to suffer such alone! Something in that loyalty amused Laufey, Thor thought with dark disgust; those fox-quick crimson eyes had felt almost to mock him when he had refused to return home. But he’d seen the strength in that, in allowing the brothers to remain together. He had allowed it, hadn’t he?

Then Thor gave a bitter little smile, following his brother’s shadow as they continued upwards to the pass he insisted they would find there. Perhaps it was not sentiment that drove it: for to allow the two sons of Odin to perish while under his hospitality would be foolish, even if they had chosen to accept this task laid before them.

 

_“During the war,” he said, voice a low rumble of thunder that Thor knew would never be his to tame, “there was a child.”_

_“I imagine there were many children caught up in that war,” Thor remarked with casual disgust. “Yet thinking of them does not appear to have stayed your hand.”_

_Loki gave a little hiss of wordless caution, but the blue-wrought king and the golden prince had eyes only for one another. “So wise you speak, when you are the one who came to this place courting war,” Laufey replied, eyes aglint with terrible crimson remembrance. “But I speak not in platitude or metaphor. I speak of a certain child, born in the last days of the conflict between our peoples.”_

_“And who was this child?”_

_“He was mine.” His eyes darted sideways, the first sign of anything like vulnerability Thor had ever viewed in the king. Then it subsided as if it had never existed, the Jötunn king resuming glacial regality as he sat upon the once-great throne of his long line. “He was a bastard, true, but still get of my royal blood.”_

_The silence yawned before them, broken first by the shift of those who stood behind the throne: Helblindi and Býleistr, the trueborn sons of the king. Few others had been permitted into the audience chamber, and Thor began to wonder how many knew of this bastard get of which Laufey spoke. His sons had demonstrated no surprise – but then that could say little. Thor had seen Loki receive fresh intelligence with little change in expression, and for all his brother had his little birds and his little ways of knowing things that were nought of his concern in the eyes of the Allfather, he did not know all. But one would rarely think so, from the way he collected and corralled information both new and old in the same dispassionate fashion._

_Thor could not help looking to him then, finding Loki’s expression indifferent, almost bored. But there was something stiff in the line of his spine that made Thor frown._

_“You are curious as to why I should speak of my eldest.”_

_Drawn back to the king, Thor did not bother hiding even this surprise. “Your eldest?”_

_“No true heir, of course. He shall never sit the throne of Jötunheimr.”_

_“A true pity.”_

_Loki’s insouciant words seemed to split the air like a well-placed dagger. Laufey’s lips twisted, voice low loathing._

_“Only the true blood can ever hope to be worthy of such place.” One hand rose from the arm of his throne, fell again in the motion of an executioner’s axe. “But then he was a curious child, though I knew him for such a short time.”_

_“He is passed, then?” Loki asked in a cut-glass manner that spoke of a born courtier playing at false sympathy. It made Laufey smile._

_“This I do not know – for this is the task I would set before you.” And all trace of a smile vanished as he spoke with the deep intonation of a law spoken as it was writ: “Son of Odin you might be, but no warriorborn are you.”_

_Anger roiled deep in Thor’s chest, resonated in every snarled word. “Do not speak of my brother in such fashion.”_

_And the eyes turned to him. “Ah, but you are warriorborn – the Allfather’s proud sword…well, now that he has taken your hammer from you.” That old scorn had returned, that which had so marked their first meeting in the great courtyard before the crumbling palace. “Raised to war, you are.”_

_“Raised to kinghood,” Thor challenged. Upon his throne, great body strong despite his age, the king seemed to grow larger still as he leaned forward, half-rising like some dread beast from the deepest ice._

_“And what of your brother? You take your father’s martial eminence in great swathe, shining with all your golden glory.” Such a compliment, given in so backhanded a fashion, left Thor feeling as tall as a chastised child sent to his knees by an impatient tutor. “And what did you leave for the other?” he taunted onward, “other than your pale shadow?”_

_“Loki is as much a prince as I.”_

_“But not a warrior, I should think.” He seemed deeply amused by the indignant expression Thor wore in immediate response. “Oh, he fights well enough – and you, for all you are vaunted warrior, you are bonded deeply to that uru-spelled weapon of yours.” The great head tilted, blunt fingers drumming disharmonic song upon the ice of his throne. “But if your greatest strength is your sword and shield, then what is his?”_

_“Seiðr.” Flatly given, Loki’s hands remained still before his hips, clever fingers unseen in the black leather and silver mail of his gauntlets. His face, too, was a study in pale disinterest. “You wish to use my seiðr for your own ends.”_

_“Merely to right the wrongs your brother did in coming here,” he corrected, and though Laufey sounded nearly offhand something shivered through Thor as those crimson eyes flicked carelessly over him before returning to Loki. “Though I shouldn’t think taking the fall in his name is anything new to you.”_

_“How_ dare _you—”_

_“Thor.” And Loki’s hand was like an iron manacle about his rising wrist even as the king gave a strange curved smile that reminded Thor suddenly, uncomfortably, of Loki’s own smiles when he had roused the desired reaction from his chosen target._

_“Clever boy,” he drawled, and shook his head – whether in disgust or amusement it could not be certain. “Yes, the golden Odinson is the Allfather’s boy indeed – brash and bold, though perhaps not as brainless as he might seem, for all his quick temper.” Then he looked again to Loki, who had not dropped his hold upon his brother. “But you are the second of his blood, bearing by right all of his lesser gifts.” And he snorted, this time in clear revulsion. “Or so they speak of them, in your golden halls.”_

_Temper prickled along Thor’s spine. “You will treat my brother with respect.”_

_“The same half-hearted respect you offer him?”_

_“He is my brother!”_

_“And you should treasure both him and his talents more than your nature dictates.” Before Thor could think to challenge further he leaned back in his throne, all patience for such matters having left him cold. “But I am neither one of you your father, and I cannot hope to correct the long-set deficiencies of your true father’s parenting.”_

_“At least he did not misplace either one of us,” Thor snapped. “That is what you wish, is it not? For us to locate your missing son?”_

_“Quicker than he seems,” Laufey mused, though not to himself; again his attention had shifted to the silent second son. “But you seem quieter than I have been led to believe.”_

_“Personally I believe in keeping my thoughts to myself until the situation is worthy of them.”_

_His smile revealed grey teeth. “You are very strong in your seiðr.”_

_“It is no compliment when you speak merely the truth, my king,” he said, and Thor growled._

_“He is not your king.”_

_“Thor, be still a moment.” Taken aback, his mouth gaped open; it gave Loki perfect opportunity to go on, voice uncharacteristically urgent. “What were the circumstances of the loss of your child, and why do you think I should be so instrumental in returning him to you? If indeed, he still is alive – are you certain that he is?”_

_The king had not missed his interest. “Yes.”_

_“And why is that?” Thor asked, and the king turned._

_“We are a land much stripped of power, Odinson.” There was deep scorn in that, even as it seemed clear he had not expected him to understand. “The Casket was to us as the Allfather is to you – the centre of our world.”_

_“And he took it from you because you would use it to destroy the lives of others.”_

_His lips curled. “That is not how it was,” he said, very nearly conversational, “but then you understand these matters only from tales given from the mouth of the victor. I should not expect that you would have the length of vision required to see it untainted so.”_

_“You speak of our father.”_

_“I do – and you have chosen to remain at your brother’s side, and so now you shall listen to me.” The heavy patterned mail worn about his hips shifted as did the king, again leaning back in his chair to assess them both. His eyes fell first upon Thor, searching and scorching. “You were both but infants when this war ended – you, the child the Allfather wished to remake a world to protect.” Then, to Loki, whose original curiosity had slipped away: “And you, second son, the fallback, shielded in your mother’s womb, secret until the beasts had fallen beneath the golden spear of the Allfather’s holy justice.”_

_“I cannot be held responsible for the circumstances of my birth,” he said, bland as freshly fallen snow. Laufey’s lips twitched upward._

_“Indeed you cannot.” He seemed near-agreeable, before that feigned affability slipped away again. “But it is not the timing that need concern us, but rather the coincidence of your strength.” Again his eyes moved over his body like a butcher assessing a cow for slaughter at market, and Thor’s hand clenched in impotent fury. “Oh, and few Asgardian males are born with such strength as you possess, this golden son – but the same can be said for the silver. You are strong beyond imagining, and yet your power is belittled, thought cowardly and weak.”_

_“Not so here?” Thor scoffed, and Laufey’s answer beat cold against his body._

_“My firstborn held such power.” Each word was like a strike, sharp-edged and frozen. “And very few are born with such upon this world – and none since the passing of the Casket from our holiest temple.”_

_“He is precious to you because of this.” Loki spoke low, but it seemed he spoke true; Laufey appeared approving when he looked to him again._

_“He is precious to the world.” Now both palms lay flat upon the throne wrought from the ice of the building, from the land beneath it. “That is how I know he lives.”_

_“If he is so important, then why have you not sought him out before now?” Thor said, frustrated. “Why, indeed, has he not come to you?”_

_“I am not certain he knows of his power – indeed, given that he was but a runt, perhaps he will not expect it of himself.” There was regret, there; perhaps even shame as he went on. “And we lack the power to find him.”_

_“Power that my brother has.”_

_“Indeed he does.” Now the matter had reached its head, the king’s power emanated from him like falling frost as he gave his command. “That is power that we would ask to borrow in recompense for the damage done by that power of yours so recklessly used here.”_

_“What was his name? This runt bastard of yours.”_

_Laufey turned once more to Loki; his eyes were as unreadable as Loki’s own tone. “He had no name then.” His lips curled, old bitterness warping his face into something far from the civilised beast he otherwise appeared. “He had not yet been gifted one.”_

_At first Loki gave silence in return, though from his expression he contemplated the implication of such. Thor’s own confusion and bewilderment almost beat him out before Loki spoke with smooth ease again. “Under what circumstances was the infant lost to you?”_

_“All children of Jötunheimr are left to the temple as an offering.” The true intended recipient of his bitterness could not be judged. “The cold god is a hungry one.”_

_“You would kill children to appease this god of yours?”_

_Even as Loki’s fought caught Thor’s booted ankle in a swift kick of warning, the Jötnar king merely raised one brow ridge. “You kill for sport and for glory, Odinson. Do not think your practices any more noble simply because those you battle are armed.” Now the bitterness poured forward even as he leaned from the waist, eyes dark as venous blood. “You call it fair, but then use is even a sword born of the ice-spirit against the mighty Mjölnir?”_

_“It is a test of worth.” Loki’s low interruption resonated like song-crystal between them all. “If the child survives such exposure to the elements of this world, then he is deemed worthy of the glory of Jötunheimr.”_

_The great head returned to Loki, eyes half-narrowed in shuttered speculation. “Indeed,” he said with sharp burr, and gave a short bark of something that only a fool might have named laughter. “It was truly unfortunate that the time of his ceremony fell at the moment when Asgard invaded.”_

_Thor’s lips thinned, unable to hold back his own clumsy words. “You did not find him at the end of the ritual.”_

_“When Asgard withdrew, I went first to the temple to find him gone.”_

_“And you believe the child lived?” Loki asked, almost bland in his curiosity; Thor snorted in high disgust._

_“Should he not have been devoured by your cold god?”_

_“It is spirit the cold one seeks, not flesh,” Laufey snapped. “It is possible one of the hilltribes took him and fled, knowing his lineage and either feared my line’s end or sought some favour in saving him – much as it goes against all known and vaunted tradition to have done so sacrilegious a thing.”_

_“Then should he not have been presented to you before now?”_

_“He is a bastard, and I have now two trueborn sons.” The look Laufey spare Loki is disgusted, as if he wondered how Thor had ever been named heir in his place. “And should he know, he would hardly seek to come to court, with no name to call his own.” He rose then to his feet, proclamation echoing from every half-cracked wall. “I wish you to find him – and to take to him his name, so that he might come home.”_

_Thor’s frown pulsed like electrified stormcloud. “And what_ is _his name?”_

_“That,” the Jötunn king said with a smile all thin ice and arctic saltwater, “we shall know only when he re-enters the temple from which he was taken, and is given back that which was taken from him before his second birth.” Such ritual made no sense to Thor’s mind; he opened his mouth to say so when Laufey waved it back with disgust. “Before his **true** birth. Without that he is but a once-birthed wraith, walking this world without a name to his wandering soul.” The blue lips pursed, voice lowering to a rumble that spoke of avalanches above, waiting to crush those unknowing below. “I would have him found, and I would have him know true power.”_

_“And what of this power?” Thor’s fingers clenched about the handle of absent Mjölnir, his scorn rising as his lessons were forgotten as quickly as they had been learned. “Would you then seek to use it against us, those who helped recover it?”_

_Loki’s gauntleted fingers closed about his upper arm, an old sign of warning; before Thor could shrug it off, the king gave a low rumble of laughter. “Be kind to my son, Odinson,” he said, sitting back in his great throne with knees spread wide, “and perhaps he shall feel in your debt enough to never wish to raise a hand to you in anger.” One hand rose, cupped his chin in languid amusement. “Perhaps in something so simple as_ friendship _we might find the vaunted peace your father carolled of but never once managed to bring about.”_

_“I accept.”_

_Thor’s head whipped around. “Loki!”_

_“We will leave as soon as you believe the conditions auspicious, and have supplied us adequately.” His deep green gaze never wavered from the king, even as his nails dug through the thick material of his brother’s borrowed surcoat. “I shall not fail in this, let me assure you.”_

_Thor stared openly at his brother, who looked only to the watching king. He seemed a stranger, almost, wrapped in furs with his hair a wild tangle about his face. And it was too pale, blue veins standing out delicate tracery beneath the translucent skin. The Liesmith, they had named him centuries past. But in this, Thor thought in something torn between despair and fierce pride, there could only be truth._

 

When at last they admitted they had lost the path given them, they had strayed so far there was no soul to ask how to return to it. Thor blamed himself aloud, though in silence he believed Loki had been at true fault. His brother, while usually slaved to logic and sense, had blindly pressed on and refused to stop even as conditions had worsened beyond repair. Never once would he even answer Thor’s questions as to how he believed they were going in anything resembling the right direction.

In their packs they carried no maps, nor tools of navigation; Loki operated purely under the influence and inference of his seiðr. Despite many a childhood jest Thor had always had faith in his brother’s abilities, whether for trick or something far greater. Yet he could not be sure Laufey understood Loki at all; given his own brother still found him an utter mystery, what hope had the foreign king of a world condemned? Thor did not wish to say this was a task beyond his brother, but with each passing day he was shamed to realise he now feared perhaps it was.

Four days past they had become separated from the guides gifted them by Laufey; whether it had been by artifice or accident Thor had still not decided. Either way Loki showed no intention of turning back to retrieve or regroup. Dogged, determined, he drove ever onward. In that Thor recognised more of his own bullheaded stubbornness – which was not to say Loki could not be stubborn in his own way. More than once Thor had seen Loki in such a state as he had sifted through tome after tome chasing after some arcane knowledge in lieu of sleep and sustenance.

And so they marched further into the wild backcountry of Jötunheimr, deeper into the stormlands. And though Thor was the greatest of all riders upon the storms, this was not his place. He had no hope of taming such raw power, even had he the greatest conduit of his divine power to hand.

One particularly chill night found them sheltering in a cavern Loki had located with casual grace. A peculiar branching formation, it was set into a great mountain that seemed quiescent. Yet when they moved deep into the chambers they found a great spring that spoke of geological unrest deep in the heart of the mountain range. To Thor’s mind, well-trained to the instincts of both hunter and ranger, it seemed stranger still that the caves stood empty. Though he did not doubt Loki could mask them, could encourage another occupant away, but still seemed odd that they should see neither hide nor hair of another body in such a place.

“But then do you think a frost giant truly cares for heat, brother?” Loki said, his great fur coat loose about his slender shoulders as he turned away. “Lay your head, and I will take first watch.”

The warmth of the spring beckoned with all the easy welcome of a woman bought, but to Thor’s mind it would put him too far back for comfort. He would not sleep well in such a place, not when Loki chose to keep watch so close to the cavern system’s gaping mouth.

Instead he built a low fire in a lesser chamber, laid out his furs there. Loki remained out of sight, but he was not far. Upon seeing his brother’s set up Loki made no effort to mask his disgust, but then he also made no effort to have him move. Thor’s stomach twisted with relief; he had not relished the thought of fighting Loki on this. Yet the truth was simple: nothing would have let him abandon his brother. His brother could defend himself alone, but then in Thor’s mind he should not have to.

A high shriek woke him from his sleep – something like the great storm that had brought down the avalanche that had separated them. But as his heart pounded blood into stiff muscle, Thor knew it not to be the wind; no air could scream in such a fashion. Already upon his feet he began the race for the entrance, already cursing the weight of the sword in his grip. It was familiar, at least: Asgardian, a relic left to Jötunheimr from the war fought upon the fields about the capital so many years beforehand. Little had changed in their metalcraft since those days, and not even the extremes of temperature had ruined the metal. But it was not Mjölnir, and there would be no forgiveness if that cost him his brother.

When he arrived, skidding into the swirl and drift of snow beyond the cave’s mouth, Thor had already proven to be too late – though not in the fashion he had feared. Still his heart stopped dead in his chest as he took in the scene before them both.

His brother’s breathing laboured from his lungs like a child refusing birth. Yet even though he had stopped now, his body seemed a half-spun spindle trembling upon an unfinished revolution; Thor could almost see the threads of loosed seiðr still spiralling out from his tense form, a web of storms woven from his divine spirit itself. Wild eyes sought back and forth, blue-green in the ever-dusk of the mountains, while snow settled like fallen stars in his raven-black hair.

Yet no other creature moved, unless the falling snow counted as life – and perhaps to the Jötnar it did. Certainly the wind whispered furiously across both the unfamiliar sky and the unnatural distance between them. Such sound beat a discordant drumbeat against his mind; for all they named him Lord of Storm, Thor did not speak this tongue. And yet he thought for a moment he could hear something else just beneath it – the caw of Huginn, the call of Muninn, both of his father’s fetches laughing into the darkness. But Odin had left his sons to their foolishness, to the whim of Laufey’s given penance. They had been left to themselves, here.

_We are all we have left to one another, in this accursed place._

A shiver moved down his spine, a line of ice and cold fire. “Loki,” he murmured, the sword dull gold-etched iron weight in his hand. So much felt _wrong_ in this place, and he did not know how he could have missed it before. Now it hung heavy upon him, words given by Hogun so many days ago: _we should not be here_.

It seemed the land itself had sought to teach them so. From the darkness they had come, hulking shapes born from the dim shadows of childhood nightmare to rouse them from sleep and safety. But whereas Thor had slept on Loki had stayed awake, and then had not hesitated not to bring down death upon them all. Thor had become the uncertain one, the uneasy one. And even now surrounded by the bodies of the fallen, of the damned, the truth was that he did not understand what his brother had done.

_We are both warriors and princes born. But this is something else. This is something—_

“Loki, it is done. They are dead. You can stop, now.”

Those wild eyes moved to him. “It is _not_ done,” he said, words harsh susurration against the rising storm. “Don’t you see? Don’t you _feel_?”

To be helpless was as alien to Thor as was the haunted fury of his brother’s drawn features. “Feel what?”

“ _Everything_.” Loki had lost a gauntlet in the battle that they had first fought upon this place: and how long he had stared at that bared hand, as if he had lost far more than just a construct of leather and mail! It made even less sense to Thor when he had called forth a new one by way of his seiðr. Yet he felt little more than radiating scorn as Loki pulled the conjured gauntlet free, discarding it to bloodied snow. He followed it down, driving himself to one knee in a mock genuflection made before no lord save for the land itself. The bare hand thrust into the snow, twisted; a moment later he raised the palm, the frozen lifeblood of Jötunheimr falling like the sands of an hourglass shattered and scorned.

“I can hear it, Thor.” His voice scratched against his mind like nails upon the marble of a fallen palace. “It never stops. _It never stops_.”

It felt a betrayal. Yet Thor looked away from the mad eyes, let them fall upon the dead Jötnar bandits around them. A shiver rocked him, again; the furs Laufey had granted them for this journey felt as flimsy and worthless as the safe passage they had not found. “You are tired, you are overwrought,” he murmured, knowing the words as worthless as still wind. Yet the silence had sharp teeth; he had to speak further, even if all he had to offer was only lame and lumbering: “…and…you must be cold, Loki. Come back inside.”

In the snow he moved like silence itself; Thor did not feel Loki until he stood before him with the bared hand laid upon his cheek. Thor jerked, but before he could even acknowledge the impossibility of that skin pressed to his Loki leaned very close; much like his palm his forehead felt like a fever, frost-red lips a breath away from his. Something very like a smile attempted to curl his lips upward but it seemed more a grimace as Loki swallowed the coolness of Thor’s startled breath whole. His own left no white spectre upon the air, as if the cold could never bring death to one such as him.

“On the contrary, brother – I think I’m _burning_.” The words hung like an incantation, a summoning of the end, for a moment, long and true. Then he turned, black shadow against the white. He did not look back even when the mouth of the cave swallowed him whole.

Thor had grown up with Loki, leaving him deeply familiar with his tantrums, his sulks, his tendencies to seek out no-one’s company but his own. But then Loki had in turn grown up with him, and would be more than familiar with the fact his brother could never let him bear such things alone. Not when he might be of some help. Thor often had little he could offer in terms of a solution to problems of logic or arcane knowledge, but he tightened his jaw as he looked to the bodies, already half-buried in the snow. Then he set about burying them further, as to not attract carrion-seekers. He would give Loki time, but then he would give Loki the presence of another whether he believed he wanted it or not.

But even though he knew he was one of the very few who could hope to give Loki comfort, he had to take care. Remaining close to the mouth of the cave, wrapped in furs enough to stay warm, he kept uneasy watch. Nothing further emerged from the shadows as the sky began, at last, to lighten to dawn. Only then did he turn from the blue-grey sky to go within.

Loki had retreated to the very deepest hollow of the cave, though Thor suspected the system would go deeper still if they but cared to look for further passages along the walls that in places seemed too roughened to be natural. As the floor sloped downward he could feel the heat of the spring even at this distance. He hoped Loki had got in, though it troubled him that Loki seemed to have caught a fever. His brother had always been ever cold to his touch, before; Sif had once commented on it, in the days before Loki had shunned further training in hand to hand combat in favour of ranged weapons.

 _He’s like ice_ , she’d said, _but then maybe that’s not so strange, given how cold his heart must be to match his mind._

He’d told her to keep such thoughts to herself in future, though he’d understood their sentiment well enough. While he had always loved his brother dearly, and truly always would, he knew others did not see Loki’s tricks and teasing in quite the light he did. And though there were times he might wish Loki would not be so casually cruel, or would take up sword or staff in place of his seiðr and his silvered knives, he tended to find his mind would stop at the beginning of such fantasy. Because he simply could not imagine his brother any other way.

Judging his brother had had time enough on his own, he entered the rounded chamber where the spring pooled deep. Though several torches, lit with easy sorcery, burned near the entrance the pool itself was all rippling shadow. Thor frowned, stepped forward.

“Loki?”

The name echoed in the darkness, whispering repetition. It felt harsh against his ears for all its low sound, and he squinted into the low light. “Loki, brother, are you in here?”

Such words garnered no answer, but as his eyes adjusted then Thor had found his own. A figure hunched in the far corner, one hand just above the surface as if he feared the emanating heat of it. Stepping forward Thor unconsciously timed each step, judging their weight as he moved in the manner he might when approaching prey only wounded and not killed outright.

“Brother?”

Perhaps he had meant to take the waters; his clothes lay in a discarded heap at his side. His stomach chose then to roll in lazy unease. No matter his hurry to clean himself, even if drenched in blood and gore from battle or hunt or merely an overenthusiastic training at the hands of his brother, Loki never failed to fold each item, or to carefully pile each piece of armour upon its twin. Instead it looked like he’d stripped himself bare as if he sought to rip away too the skin beneath.

And now he huddled in upon himself with arms wrapped about his knees, lost in borrowed darkness. And that struck Thor hard. When his brother clothed himself, in black and deep green to match his ever-watchful eyes, he melted into the shadows he favoured: never seen, never noticed until a well-placed word or a casually concealed trick tilted his hand. But unclothed, Loki should have been nothing but pale flesh, only his dark hair giving hint to his favoured nature.

Yet Thor could barely see him now.

“Loki?” His voice hung uneasy, his sudden step a harsh echo of a hunter who had lost his nerve when he truly recognised the prey he had tracked with such blind glee. “Brother, what is the matter?”

And the first words were a harsh growl from that darkness. “Leave me.”

“No.” Conviction gave him strength, and this time his step closer was sure. “I never would.”

“But I think you should.” And the cold emanated from him now even as a fever seemed to burn the air between them; it drove Thor to his knees beside him. Loki looked up, and it was as if a knife had been driven deep into Thor heart as the light caught the whirling ridges of clan and lineage upon Loki’s deep blue skin.

“Laufey sent us to find word of the child he lost in the last days of the war,” he said, low and hoarse, red eyes brilliant as spilled blood, “but I rather think Odin Allfather found me first.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is where the story basically ran away on me, cackling as it pranced off into the great darkness otherwise known as Clarice What The HELL Do You Even Think You Are DOING.
> 
> ...
> 
> Basically, I think my brain just wanted some slash. And I've never played with the idea of intersexed Jotunn before (at least not seriously) so um whoops what the hell is going on here.
> 
> [head in hands]
> 
> I am so, so sorry. I did debate whether or not I would actually post this at all, seeing as I've been suffering from poster's regret before I even posted it, but it's nearly 2am. I always do the stupid stuff at this hour of the morning, I'm afraid.

Loki did not know when it had begun. He could not even truly say when he had realised, because though most saw only the havoc his clever untruths could wreak upon the lives of those around him, he had first learned to lie by fooling his still greatest victim: always and only himself.

The king’s eyes upon him were a memory of scarlet burning gall he could taste yet upon his lips. _Had he known?_ Madness lay that way, he thought with bitter humour; his mind curled uncomfortable around the very idea that the broken king of a broken kingdom had sent him to chase a ghost when he himself was its walking corpse. Given Loki could see the humour in such irony, he supposed it would not be a stretch to imagine his sire could find the same.

Yet that would not be his true purpose; a king could not rule a kingdom upon tricks and cruel humour alone. _A bastard runt_ , Loki had named himself. But Laufey had gone further in the other direction: he had named him as precious to the world. _Just another precious_ thing _, more instrument than person_ , he thought. Wearing his unadulterated skin Loki could feel that certainty. The truth of it pulsed beneath his flesh, cold and warm, inviting and forbidding both. It was a legacy made to be a gift and a curse, to be a burden to bear while too breaking the shackles that had bound him his entire life as the second son of a false father who could only have taken him for dark purpose—

“Loki.”

He jerked away from his brother’s faltering words, though his hand remained true to its chosen course. “Don’t touch me,” he snarled. “Do you not remember what happened to Volstagg? I’ll only burn you.”

“ _Loki_.” Sudden weight came upon him – Thor had draped his nude body in the thick fur taken from about his own shoulders. It spoke of more forethought than Loki would generally credit to his brother, who so preferred instinct to outright sense. But then he wrapped those great arms about him and held inescapably tight. The crimson eyes stung, even as his words knotted in upon themselves in rough tangle.

And, lower, something else began to pulse in a manner that made his blood freeze, even as it began to flood his damned body entire with sudden hot sensation.

“Thor, you idiot, let me go.” His voice did not tremble, though he had no idea how he kept it so even. “You’ll freeze.”

But Loki recognised well that stubborn tilt to his jaw, the tightening of those thick muscled arms. “You are colder than me.”

“Because I am _made_ to be cold. This is what I am.” Truth though it might be, it still felt to be a lie upon his lips. A grimace moved from his lips to coil and uncoil in his stomach, restless serpent seeking somewhere to sink its fangs. And with that came the flush of before, returning to him even as he wished for anything but _that_.

Loki had first felt it when the Jötnar bandits had taken him by surprise, so engrossed had he been in his workings as Thor slept out of sight. Knee-deep in a drift, hands pressed into the snow that refused to freeze the Aesir blood in his borrowed veins, he had not even truly known his mind in that moment. All that remained had been the compulsion to go out into the storm and give himself over to sensation, to the incessant whisper of the land beneath him. He’d known then. He’d known, perhaps, from the very first moment Laufey had spoken of how his lost son had been born to this world as more than merely a child with a choice as to the life he might one day live.

 _No-name._ He had dug his fingers deeper into the snow, gauntlets both real and conjured long gone. _What is my name, then? Who would you name me, if not Loki Liesmith, Loki Silvertongue, Loki Odinson, second of the realm and first of his not-name?_

Even when deep in his contemplations Loki had never been one to be easily snuck up on. But they had done so. Great hands had come out of the darkness to close about his narrow waist, drawing him back to the great body as if they had a mind to snap him in two. But the fingers digging into the dip of hipbones, the palms hard and cold against skin even through the leather of his clothing – at that rough touch something had twisted low in his abdomen, a darker desire than that of mere death. His boots had dragged a trail through the snow as he arched in the creature’s grasp, a keening wail loosed from his bared throat.

That had halted them all. Even as his mind screamed in a language Loki could not recognise, did not _dare_ recognise, they had set him down in a fashion near-reverent. It could have ended there, perhaps. The Alltongue ought to have allowed communication between them for all these had seemed base creatures, less evolved than the faded majesty of Laufey upon his broken throne. But the low rumble that came from the chest of the tallest – Loki had not understood it as words, but rather as the slow avalanche of sudden desire building to inevitable collapse.

A hand had come to rest upon his cheek. With it had followed the now-familiar blossom of cold, but inside it was accompanied by a flare of sudden unknown heat. Then, all had changed. Fury, denial, lust for flesh in a fashion far more lethal: the combination had been too volatile for anything but what happened. And with silver knives in hand and seiðr summoned from sky and land, Loki had given over to a berserker bloodlust he had never before known.

Their blood tasted hot on his lips, strange and beautiful – and yet it was not the flavour he sought. Falling beneath one creature in a feigned moment of collapse, Loki did so just to feel the heat and heaviness of a body atop his own. Then he laughed in easy hysteria to taste it true: the hot spurt of blood from an opened neck, the spasm of a hard body as death released from where there once throbbed desperate life.

Only as it had ended had Thor stepped out from the cradling darkness of the chosen cavern. He was not one to ever be afraid, not his golden brother. But in that moment Loki had seen fear in him, though he knew his skin had reverted to the Aesir pale that had been revealed as lie rather than truth. Thor had stared at him as if Loki had become a sudden stranger.

 _More stranger than you know_ , he had thought with bitter clarity. But Thor knew now; he had been unable to hold it back with the thrumming whisper of Jötunheimr so close to his true skin. But instead of the touch of the external, this had been a touch from within. His own soul had become alien and strange – and the burning desire that accompanied it had not been slaked even by the bloody deaths of those who had sought to bring him something he did not want.

But then he did not know what he wanted. He just _wanted_.

Twisting in his brother’s grip, he sought release. But Thor, fool as he was, held tighter, face pressed into the tangle of his hair.

“It’s not who you truly are.” Muffled, his words sounded as if they came through a filter of something shredded and snarled. “Loki, don’t…I just…”

He should pull away and he knew it. But he could not. Shivering violently, wrapped in his brother’s cloak, he surrendered to that cold certainty. Yet the damned heat lurked beneath and he could not deny it, could not direct it elsewhere with further death. Not when only his brother remained the only living body anywhere close enough to give comfort of any kind.

“You were warm, before,” Thor whispered, and Loki tried to laugh while suspecting it came out more in the fashion of a sob.

“In fact, I was burning.”

“What is happening to you?” His fear was such a peculiar thing, so alien to his very being. “Is it…?”

“How should I know?” Even as his body twisted beneath him, every nerve waking to whisper its need along the lines of trembling muscle, Loki gave a sharp chuckle. “Father never permitted us to learn anything beyond the usual of frost giants. Why should I know anything more than you, just because I am one?”

“Because you listened to your lessons, whereas I did not.” Awakening urgency beat against Loki’s tangled thoughts like a spiked morningstar, harsh and piercing. “Loki—”

“Be _quiet_.”

Surprisingly, he was. Less surprisingly, it did not last long. As Loki trembled in his arms, yearning to be anywhere else but there even as his traitorous body carolled deep pleasure, Thor tried again. “It matters not, to me.”

“That I am the self-same monster you vowed to eradicate as a child?” The dark nails cut crescent-casts into the tough flesh of his Jötunn palms, waiting to fill with molten blood. “Do not be a fool, Thor, this changes nothing.”

“No. It doesn’t.” So stubborn, and so damnably _earnest_ ; the latter had always been far worse than the former, to Loki’s reckoning. And that was even before the idiot went too far entire. “I love you.”

He gave a shout of laughter, though it caught up in upon itself, half-choked. “And you should not,” he advised in harsh consonants and hollow vowels; he felt rather than saw his brother’s frown and furrowed brow.

“Do I ever do as I am told?”

“You will be king.” This time when he pulled away, Thor allowed it. Loki kept the cloak about his naked shoulders, words bitter as he pushed to unsteady feet. “You will need to learn to do as the realm bids you.”

Hi brother did not rise, remained upon his knees by the warmth of the pool. When at last he spoke, his eyes did not stray once from the truth of the brother-illusion he would never have back again as once was. “I would not learn statecraft at the cost of my soul, brother.”

“I am not your brother.”

Finally his temper flared, sharp as Loki’s own knives. “Why must you always lie?”

“It is no lie! _I_ am the lie!” Hands clenched into fists about the hem of the cloak, and he shivered even as that damned desiring heat flared brighter yet. “Small wonder, perhaps, that I was always so suited to spinning those of my own creation.” Returning to Thor’s side, cursing the need that drew him to his broad warmth like the pressure and pull of a lodestone, Loki dropped to his own knees again. He had strength enough to spare him no attention. Instead he stared at his rippling reflection, lips curved in dark amusement. Peculiar, that his hair should remain the same, wild as it was. With a snarl he swiped at the water, though he knew it banished not the one who created the image.

“If it displeases you so,” Thor asked, tentative enough that it seemed he realised how foolish a question this might be, “then why do you not turn back?”

They were too close, Loki knew; he could feel a low twisting in his guts that reminded him all too well of how the strong touch of the bandit leader had focused desire in not one place, but two. _How unnatural must this be?_ he thought as he learned closer, wondering at his own folly even as he whispered in soft teasing: “Am I _disturbing_ you, brother?”

His nostrils flared, as if he scented something peculiar; the furrowed brow spoke too of his bewilderment. “Not so much as you are disturbing yourself. Loki, perhaps it would be better—”

“I can’t.”

He blinked, then frowned. “Why not?”

Everything in Loki wished to mock him for that; he could count upon one hand the number of times Thor had ever bothered to ask questions of seiðr instead of pressing it aside for Loki’s sole attention. “I don’t know. Call it instinct, perhaps.”

“Instinct for what?”

“I don’t _know_.” Frustration warred with sense, lost badly; his dignity was a bloodied battered mess upon the battlefield when Loki turned to his brother and leaned so close the words shivered across his brother’s skin like coalescing frost. “ _This_ , perhaps?”

Without any further thought as to the foolhardiness of such a gesture, Loki pressed his cold lips to Thor’s, found them hard and surprised and chapped with wind and harsh weather. It lasted scarcely more than a second, but it seemed enough; when he drew back, his abdomen felt a pit of writhing snakes, and Thor’s blue eyes had opened wide enough to swallow the realms whole.

“ _Loki_.”

“I am sorry.” The heat, again, rose in him with demanding desire. Stumbling away, he wondered if it would help – to go to the entrance of the cave, to throw himself into snow that held body and blood and as if it might freeze this unspeakable desire solid. He was already throwing off the cloak, hating the sight beneath: blue skin, ridged, alien and familiar.

Already, too, he could hear the booted footsteps coming up behind him. “Go _away_.”

“There is nowhere else to go.”

Loki turned, too furious to be truly shamed by his hideous nudity in this darkness. “So you stay with me.”

“Even if there was some place else, I would stay always with you.”

“ _Thor_.”  And his hands twitched, yearning against for the mask of the fur. “I don’t want you to look at me. Go away!”

But even as he turned his back Thor rested a hand upon one shoulder, trusting to Loki not to let him burn. “Loki, look at me.”

He hitched a breath, wondered why he held back even as he knew. “I won’t.”

“Your kiss didn’t…it didn’t hurt me.”

 _I am new to this, perhaps – but then it is my very nature, you fool_. “I should never have done it,” he said without inflection, and Thor drew a frustrated breath.

“Then why did you?”

“I just wanted to.” _How do I tell you, brother, that I didn’t truly want to kill those Jötnar?_ “This…body, it…” _That I wanted them to hold me down, to fuck me hard in every orifice and every crevice, great hard cocks sliding in and out of me until I was nothing but sensation and screaming release?_ “I don’t want to be alone,” he said, each word forced and faltering. “And you are so _warm_.”

Then the arms came about him from behind. Loki stiffened, but Thor gave no indication he felt any discomfort as he drew him close.

“You are not Laufey’s lost prince, Loki,” he whispered into the snarls of his hair, “you are the brother I’ve always known how to find, even when everyone else never knew where to look.”

“Idiot.” He wanted nothing more than to be just furious, to shove him back and deal to whatever this was on his own. But he had only hesitant words and no action with which to force them. “Just…leave me here. This is where I belong.”

“It is not. If I truly thought that, then would I have not run when given half a chance?”

The laugh gurgled low in his throat. “You’re just afraid of mother’s wrath. You always have been. How many times did I take the fall for something you did simply because you begged me to?”

“You were always her favourite; she could not bear to punish such earnest sincerity. I would only fail.” Finally he turned them about, so that even in this darkness Loki could see his hurt expression. “And Loki, how often were you complicit in such matters? How often were they not your idea entire?”

He drew a breath, sharp with misery. _If only you knew what brought us to this place, you foolish oaf._  “I am not her child.”

“She loves you all the same.” His throat worked, eyes creased in confusion. “She must know, Loki.”

 _Oh, will you ever learn to say the right thing?_ “She must always have known,” Loki replied, edging too close to the limits of contemptuous accord. “She’s lied to me from the very beginning.”

From the stricken look he wore, Thor knew there was nothing he could say to that.

“But it would never have been her idea,” Loki went on, and true venom rendered every word ugly, vicious. “It must have been _his_.”

The shock of that hit him hard, though Loki did not think his brother had not come to such conclusion on his own; it was simply that Thor was far better at denying that which he did not wish to acknowledge. “Father would only have wanted what was best for you,” he said, slow, and Loki turned more incredulous still.

“Because I am his son?” The urge to strike him rose unbidden, and his palms itched to slap across his gormless face. “Thor, you fool! When he took me, I was not his son. I was just an abandoned runt, the bastard child left in sacrifice to the world of my damned _true_ father. He took me not because of who I was. It was _what_ I was that he wanted – Laufey’s son.” Fury wavered, becoming something darker, harsher, turned against his own hated flesh. “I am just an untempered weapon he could hammer into the shape that pleased him best,” he snarled, already curling in upon himself. “The shape I wish even now I still was, even though it’s not me. Because this…my true self…it makes me sick.”

“Loki.”

He seized under Thor’s uncertain hand, then shouldered it away.  “Don’t touch me. Don’t look at me!” And his hands pressed over his own face, as if that way he could hide from his own body, and his shame at the weakness and fear the truth of it had engendered in him. “Thor, I just…I _can’t_ …”

 “Just stay with me.” Though Thor did not embrace him again, the warmth of him drew close again. “The storm will pass, I promise you. We will go home.”

“It’s not my home.”

“It is.” Thor had never been one prone to tears under any circumstance. Yet he sounded near to them now; Loki could not help but think it borne of frustration. All he wanted to do was send him away, to tell him to vent his temper by bringing down the mountain entire with Mjölnir. But then he had the hammer not – Thor had not even his brother, now. And still he pressed on, blinded as always by his foolhardy belief in a world far kinder than the one they lived in. A home that had never been Loki’s even as Thor denied that truth. “It always was. It always will be!”

“I am a monster.”

“You are my _brother_.”

Loki, whose own volatile emotions so often betrayed him only in the isolation of his own chambers, drew a sobbing breath. How he hated to be so vulnerable, so pathetic. “But I want you,” he whispered in despair, fingers clutching at his own skin as if he could rip it away. “This treacherous, monstrous body, it _wants_ you.”

Startled, he drew back; the reflex made Loki cackle even as he wished more to sob.

“You don’t even know how deep this depravity goes!” And that which he wished most to deny, that dual throbbing low in his pelvis, caught his breath in his throat. He could barely speak above a whisper. “I think now I understand why we never see nor hear of the women of the frost giants.”

“Loki,” he said, and one hand came to rest upon his hair. “Just…lie still.”

“I can’t. I’m cold, then hot, and all that calms me…all I want… _lie with me_.”

He wished he hadn’t said as much the moment Thor’s arms came about him, holding him tight in familiar fraternal intimacy. When he spoke again, his voice was tight with desire and regret.

“This isn’t what I meant.”

Thor said nothing to that, but his hand remained in his hair. Already cursing his new body, his true form, Loki caught those fingers in his own shaking grip, guided them downwards. Thor took a sharp breath as it ghosted over his half-hard cock, but then…then…

“What is this?”

The tremble of Thor’s voice matched his own. “I am not your _brother_ ,” Loki whispered, his own voice perfect tremor. “In so many ways than just one.”

“You will always be mine.”

“Liar. If you meant that true, you would take me here. You would make me yours.”

“Loki,” he said, and begun to withdraw. The raw panic of his reply left Loki as hot with shame as much as desire.

“Don’t stop touching me.” Choking on the confession, he whispered: “I feel nothing when you are not touching me.”

Though his hand stilled, Thor sounded desperately unhappy. “I love you,” and his uncertainty left him almost pitiful, “but I do not think—”

“You never think!” Frustration and fury and desperate need raised his voice to a shout. “You always just _act_!”

Muddled as his mind felt, Loki realised he was going about it the wrong way; when he wished to coax Thor to a chosen action, he would simply use the well-worn tool of reverse psychology. But he did not want to play games. He just wanted Thor to understand for himself, to do what Loki wanted because Loki wanted it.

“ _Please_ ,” he whispered, and Thor looked stunned.

“Loki, you are…this has been a shock…”

“To you as well as me.”

Given how the cold had weathered his lips so, Thor barely had to worry them with his teeth before they split open afresh, bright iron upon them. “And so I do not think I am able to make this decision any more than you.”

“Thor.” Grasping his hand, Loki pulled it down and pressed it again without further preamble to the dampness at the apex of his thighs. “Perhaps this is what the Allfather would have had me do, had he not taken me to be your brother.”

Long fingers moved in sudden spasm, and Loki’s grip tightened about the wrist it spanned. Thor could break free; should Loki wish to hold his brother, brute strength would never be his chosen method. But it was Thor’s dangerous curiosity that held him still, even as the fingers flicked out across the folds of his unfamiliar sex. Thor’s eyes widened, any further words hitching suddenly in his throat. Loki’s breath quickened in sudden harmony as he gave into it again. The unfamiliar body shivered beneath the blunt tips of those fingers, though they barely teased against his skin.

“Perhaps he meant to unite our kingdoms,” he whispered, watching with urgent intent the way Thor’s eyes moved in quick skittering curiosity; every time he tried to look away, they would return to where they had begun. “Perhaps he meant for me to lie on my back and spread my legs and bring forth all the half-bred heirs that would mean our peoples had at last sought the peace he couldn’t create with war won and lost.” Each word dripped unholy passion, painting picture with tone and whisper. “Perhaps he meant for you to take me to bride, and be the one always and forever at your side.”

“You will always be at my side.”

With that Loki moved his hips. Desire had left him slick enough that Thor’s fingers slid inside with alarming ease; he gave a gasp, but he didn’t pull out. Pupils blown, thin ring of colour, twinned. And Loki swallowed hard; had only known this aspect of his true self for such a short time, though he had played at being a woman more than once.

It felt a pale shadow in comparison to the truth of this; Loki’s body thrummed, alive with sensation in a way he did not, could not have known. Pushing forward, he took those fingers deeper. Thor remained still, staring as his fingers disappeared further in, to the knuckle. And then, almost without thought, his thumb moved down, began a low circle where he would find any Aesir woman’s clit.

And Loki’s too, it would seem. Hips jolted beneath the tough callused pad of his brother’s thumb, and that before he pressed down. His back bowed back in acute arch, startled. And then he caught his breath, looked up.

“Please.”

Thor stared still at where they joined, enthralled. “You are my brother,” he whispered, stunned as a green warrior standing before his first great army, and Loki wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh. Instead he gave the faintest of shrugs.

“I was born to be whatever anyone needs me to be.”

“Then be what _you_ want to be!”

The blaze of his brother’s eyes, bright mirror of his naïve convictions, might had left Loki cold with incredulity had his true form not been ablaze with such cruel desire. “I want you.” The next words wrenched free of his darkest, deepest mind before he had mind enough to call them back. “I’ve _always_ wanted you.”

Thor’s shock rendered him little more than a statue, and Loki went on, unable to stop now the dam had been breached.

“I’ve ached for you my entire life – always in your shadow, always jealous of anyone who took you from me.” Hate, both for his own weakness and for Thor’s strength in never seeing it, welled in him. “ _Please_ , Thor. You said…you promised you would never leave me.”

The plea induced what seemed an involuntary crook of fingers inside him, delicate against the walls of his cunt. Loki gave a keening breath as Thor withdrew at last.

“Brother—”

“I am overdressed.” Roughly spoken, Thor seemed almost embarrassed. When he got to his feet, his whole frame shook – but as his crotch came into view the hardness of him could not be denied. Breath whistled between his teeth as Thor stripped. It took too long, but Loki did not dare use his magic upon a living creature with mind and body and soul in such turmoil. Thor, at least, had presence of mind enough to take several furs and spread them near the warm steam of the pool. Then he was lifting him, laying him down with an easy care that Loki wanted to protest. Instead he just arched upward, desperate for sensation and succour.

“Hurry _up_ , would you?”

Thor let out a huffing breath that might have been a laugh under less urgent circumstances. “I need more light.”

“I am sure you have done this enough times in the dark.”

“Not with you,” he said, earnestness untroubled by Loki’s biting tone. “I want to see you.”

That gave him true pause, and when he tried to laugh it away it was high-pitched and discordant. “I’m a monster.”

“You are mine.”

The tremble in that voice was oddly the compulsion that gave Loki thought enough to give him what he thought he wanted. Within a moment sparking, spluttering light threw his brother’s face into sharp relief, brows furrowed and eyes searching upon his body, his face, his eyes.

“I do prefer your eyes green,” he said, slow, halting. “But I can still see you, even in the red. I’d always recognise you.”

“I don’t even recognise myself, idiot.”

Fingers began to trace the whorls and arches of cheek and forehead, bearing only the faintest tremor. “They speak of family, I believe.”

“I have no family.”

Thor looked up, hurt. “You have me.”

“Truly?”

Even though he chose that moment to draw back, given the manner in which he chose to kneel between his thighs it was no true retreat. “What oath would satisfy you, Loki?”

Propped up on one elbow, Loki bit his lip. Hard. He had seen his brother’s cock before, and had never thought much of it besides the fact it was one thing Thor had not quite bested him in. But it hung thick and hard now, engorged with blood and heavy in his grip when he reached out for it. Thor’s eyes moved downward, widening to see his brother’s blue grip wound about his length.

“Is…is this honestly what you want?”

“I don’t know.” And the truth of the matter was that he truly didn’t. But his new body – his _true_ body – ached with hollow need. Even as children it had always been each other they’d turned to first for companionship, for camaraderie. Thor could fill the emptiness. There was barely any question as to how he could do so. “Don’t stop. Stay with me.”

“Always.” Bowing his head like a penitent to his patron god, Thor’s lips pressed against his quickening pulse. The guiding hand Loki gave did not go alone. Thor’s own closed about it, and together they brought it home to slick promise. Letting go as one, Thor sank without further question into his alien body.

At such sweet intrusion Loki could not hold back a hissing breath edged with surprised burn; he might be smaller than his brother, but Thor remained an impressive enough specimen. But any pain was as pleasure – and for whatever ailed his true body, Thor was balm enough.

A roll of his hips bought each nerve to singing sparking length; Loki’s hand dropped, ghosted over the slickness of Thor’s half-withdrawn length. “Deeper.” Hoarse, he could not think further than the next thrust. “I can’t feel all of you.”

And Thor pushed so hard he shrieked, legs rising by reflex to twine around his waist, holding him there. Panting for breath, head a dizzied half-emptied slate, Loki dug nails into the broad shoulders. Above him, Thor paused, trembling with the effort of holding still.

“I…brother, tell me if I must stop.” His hips moved with instinctive force, and Thor hissed to force a halt again. “I…I do not wish to hurt you.”

“Why not?” And Loki loosed his laughter to the cavern, half-hysterical in the gloom. “What is life without hurt and pain?”

“What would it be without love and trust?”

The counter only made him laugh harder. “Why should they be mutually exclusive?” His nails drew blood, this time, and Thor could not stop one, two, three hard thrusts before he mastered his body again. Loki trailed an affectionate hard over heaving flank, almost pitying. “And I never would have thought you one for philosophy while balls-deep in a willing conquest, brother.”

Irritation fluttered across features primarily twisted in the throes of a pleasure not quite expected. “You are not a _conquest_.”

There seemed little point in even attempting to hold back his laughter now. “But _oh_ how I wish to be conquered!”

“Even if I thought to have conquered you, I would know it had only been at your allowance, and by your desire.”

It bothered Loki, often, that his fool brother still held that capacity to surprise him. But then, other times, he revelled in it. Spreading his legs wider, he sought to take him deeper even as he gave a wanton: “ _Fuck_ me, then.”

A low growl gave purpose to the twitch of his cock within his cunt. Then, he withdrew only to press in, deeper than ever before. Loki welcomed it with a cant of hips, and sneered up at him. “ _Harder_ , damn you.”

The next thrust brought with it an explosion of pain in his pelvis as Thor drove him too hard against the rock; even thick fur gave only so much cushioning. Mind changing at lightning speed Loki scrabbled upward, catching Thor offguard in a tangle of limbs. It was but the work of moments to force him over, to straddle his hips, to end with his brother on his back and his cock still held within him. Hands moved instinctively to his thighs and Loki’s hands rested over them, pressing nails to trace the curve of the ridges there.

“They say these are the markings of family,” he said, contemplative, “so mark me as yours.”

“You are already mine.”

“Not yet.” The muscles of his thighs tightened and with them those inside; Thor hissed even as Loki rose. His own breath left his lungs in a shuddering sigh as he sank down, the movement again accompanied by the scrape of blunted nails. “I appear to be doing all the work.”

Mockery of any kind had never been something Thor could take kindly to, even when his temper had not been frayed almost to breaking. A growl loosed from his chest, and he yanked his hands free of Loki’s guiding grasp. They skated over hip with bruising force, then rose to his shoulders. When they descended they moved hard and fast, in their wake ridges carved straight down his back: this, the simple symbol of his brother’s strength.

With a cry like that of a bird loosed to the sky upon the hunt Loki arched, head thrown back. The blood of the slain lingered yet in his throat. Then, thighs trembling, back aflame with fresh agony, he reached around, grasped a hand like cold manacle. When he pressed two fingers into his mouth, he tasted it there too. Blood like ichor, rich and thick, but living still. Even as his cock twitched in response, Thor frowned to see Loki’s lips wrapped about his bloodied fingers, tongue over tip and seeking beneath nail.

“Brotherhood is more than blood.”

Something almost like a smile gave his face dark amusement as Loki returned the fingers to Thor by pressing them against his lips, dark blood like a balm against the chapped skin. The next words came without thought, vicious and tender as he whispered them in wake of that same blood. “Ah, and so would you do this to me even if I was your brother true, then? Have you thought of it before – slipping through the corridors before slipping between my sheets, and then slipping that cock of yours deep inside my welcoming ass?” He let his hand go then, even as he clenched hard about the length he held captive in his body as he crooned. “Or would you rather prefer I struggled, denying you with words even as my body told you nothing but yes?”

Eyes wide, he choked on that even as his jerked hips indicated his cock did not find it so obscene a suggestion. “Loki!”

“That is my name,” he agreed, and gave a casual twist of hips. “So give it back to me, then.”

The great body surged, then rolled them both over; Loki’s head hit rock so that he saw stars. But Thor had moved far beyond pleasantries. Gladness rose in him even as his brother began to pound so deep that he ached with every thrust, every harsh rasp of the cock within his cunt. Loki had seen animals mate this way, wild and domesticated alike, rutting against one another in mindless pleasure. And he wished it could be so easy, for him, to give over to nothing but that. But instead his mind moved as it always had, seeking some sort of ending even as he feared it but a beginning.

Thor came first – of course Thor came first – his release hot inside him. But he was not such a fool, perhaps; even as he slowed, even as Loki’s own hand moved down his hand pushed violently through. Blunt fingers pressed to the clit in quick staccato until he keened, clenched tight about the cock he had milked dry as his own pulsed between their bellies. And that heat remained even as he cooled, the desire dimming, a flare faded to ember that still did not quite go out.

And into that darkness, a sigh escaped like a dream given over to the night before it had even once been known. “Why did you stay, Thor?” he whispered as though he had already pulled away, for all Loki still held him true within his alien form. And he wondered why as his fingers dug deeper their anchorage. “Why didn’t you leave me?”

“Why must you ask these things?” Hands, clumsy in post-coital relaxation, caught his face, held it steady; the blue eyes were the star-wrought blue of an Asgardian morning. “It was my fault. This would not even be happening, if not for me.”

Loki could have screamed his fear and loathing to the alien sky. _I am a tool passed from one hand to the next, to be used as one desires – and the fault of passing is all upon my own head._ Instead he closed his eyes, shoved all the roiling volatile feelings down as deep as ever he had dared. “Oh, just shut up.”

He did not, but then Loki had not expected him too. Instead he gently withdrew, even as Loki gave a hissing breath. One hand moved over his flank, as if he were but a skittish colt to be quietened with sound and treat. “Are you still cold, brother?”

“No.” The inanity, the idiocy of the question should have made him laugh. Instead, he half-choked on the darkness he had left himself. “ _No_.”

“Are you burning?”

“No. I am just…warm.” There came then a shiver across his skin – something from the inside out, the false face of the Aesir returning. Thor’s eyes rested upon him, a kind of wondering watchfulness that was rare when it came to Loki’s magics. Usually he had not the patience for such. But he watched, and waited, and when he spoke his voice was low and simple.

“Promise me something.”

Half-slitting his eyes, Loki decided he was too exhausted for games. “What?”

“That if you wake before I do, that you will not leave me.”

Loki went very still.

“It is not that I do not trust you,” he persisted, even as his own exhaustion seemed all the greater. “More that I fear for you.”

So many replies shifted through his mind. In the end, turned his face away, felt the skin heat with the spring waters. “We can’t speak of this again.” He should go to those waters, he thought, and wash away all evidence of what skin he wore beneath, and what he had done while wearing it. “Ever.”

“I am not ashamed.”

“You should be.” And he laughed, knowing that in this, he had secured his own damnation, his own expulsion from a family that had never been his. The land gave an amused hum beneath his feet, and Loki shivered to hear its call. “Blood relative or not, we have been raised as brothers.”

“And brothers we shall always be.”

Loki sighed. “You are not aiding matters.”

At first Thor seemed almost bewildered by the exhausted accusation. Then he rolled his shoulders, a sloppy grin upon his features, and Loki knew he was lost. “I am not trying to.”

“You are a fool.”

He smelled of sex and summer when he gathered Loki to his chest, drawing the furs over them both. “You keep saying that,” he whispered against the slowing pulse of his throat. “It seems to be losing all meaning.”

But Loki wondered if the same could be said for his life even as he curled nude against his brother. And if Thor found some childish succour in winding fingers through his damned hair, then he was too tired to give argument.

Or so he told himself. He’d always been so very clever with words.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all she wrote.

Thor learned very quickly not to ask how Loki knew the way back to the palace. He learned even quicker not to ask him what he planned to tell Laufey. But lessons did not always stick – and in many ways he was apt to forget them even quicker than he’d learned them.

“It is none of your concern,” Loki repeated, exasperated and furious; it was a conversation they had had but a thousand times over. And Thor seethed beneath the truth of that, voice rising like thunder in the valley through which they trudged alone.

“Of course it is my concern!” he shouted, caring not who might hear; they felt to be utterly alone in this cursed place, and his heart ached to think of Loki lost here forever. “You will come home to Asgard!”

“It is not my true home.”

“And this wasteland is?”

“You heard what Laufey said.” And it hurt, that Thor could hear gladness and pride in that. “I am something born more of the land than those who live upon it.”

Staring at his back, Thor felt both hot and cold. It was not an alien concept to his mind; Thor had known from a very young age what it meant to be the heir of the Allfather. Loki might have mocked his understanding, but Thor had known that his life was dedicated first to Asgard, and then to his family, and then lastly to his own self.

But in this, his heart ached for the injustice of it all. “I can’t…” Drawing a harsh breath, he tried again. “Loki, I _can’t_.”

“You can’t what?”

 _Go without you. Imagine life without you. Rule without you, you who was always to be by my side._ No idea how to put any of that into words without leaving Loki feeling himself as always the shadow. Bowing his head against his impatience, Thor knew himself defeated.

“It is your choice.”

“How good of you to remember.” Glacial, Loki fell to silence. But even in that Thor remembered how hot he had felt – both inside, and out. Despite the freezing temperature of their surrounds a deep flush coloured his cheeks. No regret followed it – save for that it might never happen again. That he might not even see Loki again, let alone find pleasure and release in his body.

 _It never shamed me._ The words burned even as his skin half-froze in the chill of Jötunheimr’s mountains; so blindly he followed the slim figure of his brother as Loki cut his unrelenting way through the snow. _No, it didn’t – either to lie with a frost giant, or with my brother. Does that make me the monster, then? That if you would but allow it, I would take you again? That I would do so until you begged me to stop? That I would do so even after you did?_

A heat, Loki had named it, clinical and thoughtful in the dimness of the cavern the morning after. Though they had done so together many times over as children, adolescents, and adults alike, that day they had bathed separately in the spring. But as Thor had scrubbed away dirt and sweat and blood, Loki had sat with his back to the wall and eyes upon the corridor and had spoken of it with as much emotion as he generally reserved for simple fact and conjecture.

 

_“I don’t really understand it.” Long fingers pressed to his lips, an old gesture of deep thought cultivated since early adolescence. “But there are other animals who breed in the same fashion. And given individual frost giants appear to have the reproductive capabilities both of male and female, perhaps it is not so strange the female organs should only be fertile in cycles, while the male aspect is always so.”_

_Thor’s hand stuttered to a stop over the curve of one shoulder. “_ Fertile _?”_

_“I suspect the shock of transformation brought it on.” Loki shifted, gave no indication of having even heard Thor’s strangled single-worded contribution to the matter. “I have no idea what the reproductive age of Jötnar might be, but perhaps my body erred towards caution. Call it survival, I suppose – even a body such as mine would carry the instinct of propagation of its species.”_

_All thought of bathing had left him, and he felt very cold even in the depths of the hot spring, stomach twisted in dull sickness. “Loki, could you…could_ we _have…”_

_His first acknowledgement of his brother’s fear was a scornful chuckle. “Oh, I doubt it.” Twisting about, face a pale oval in the half-darkness, he raised an eyebrow. “I am a runt, malformed and misshapen. I would be surprised indeed to find myself capable of bearing young in such a fashion.”_

_“Can you be so sure?”_

_Snorting, he turned his back, raised a hand before his face and twisted it in thoughtful contemplation. “Recall the size of the other Jötnar, Thor,” he said, and laughed again. “Yes. I am quite sure.”_

_“I…” He looked down to the water; ever in motion, it remained clean and clear even as he tainted it with filth washed from skin and soul. “…I…suppose it would be for the best.”_

_“Yes, imagine the scandal if the first bastard the golden son fathered was upon another bastard thought to be his brother.” Thor jerked again, opening his mouth to complain; Loki spoke over him so easily as he mused his mockery. “But which would be worse, that it was bastard or brother? Or is it just the weight of both that would pull you down from your mighty pedestal?”_

_Sick with shame and sorrow, Thor could not meet Loki’s mocking gaze. “I would defend you.”_

_“Yes, and you’ve done such a wonderful job of that before.” A scrape, and a stretch; when Thor looked up Loki had stood, hands on hips as he stared down at him with shuttered impatience. “Hurry up. We cannot tarry here forever.”_

 

Though they had encountered few upon the return journey, it seemed perhaps Laufey had his ways of knowing what passed in his realm even as the Allfather had Huginn and Muninn for such tasks. They had scarcely entered the city when a score of giants met them in cool welcome; Helblindi, the eldest son, dismounted his monstrous steed and nodded in acknowledgement to their own status. “My father would see you now.”

“We have travelled far. Would it be permissible for us to make ourselves more presentable before we come before the king with our news?”

The crimson eyes narrowed. “What news do you carry?”

“That which is for the king’s ear only.” Loki’s smile was oddly sweet. “And yours, too, perhaps – if he should allow it.”

The dark head he held high, his small pale body clothed in black as he strode through the high-ceiled corridors that ought to have dwarfed him and yet somehow could not. Thor stepped forward in his shadow, silent, feeling in each step bitter memory. How many times had he mocked Loki for his skill with seiðr rather than sword, with word rather than weapon? How many times had he made him feel small and unwelcome in the golden palace that had been his home for so very long?

As they followed Helblindi deeper into the glittering blue-ice palace of Jötunheimr, Thor could not help but compare Loki’s slender form to the hulking form of the giant. Sick with sudden jealousy, he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood. This was Loki’s true brother – half-blood, yes, but he had something Loki would not ever deny him so easily as he had Thor.

 _I am not your brother_.

Licking dry lips, Thor could taste now both fresh blood and the lingering shadow of a night long passed. The heat still flickered upon his own skin, and his groin tightened. In that he felt sicker still. Loki said they would not speak of it again – and save for the strange liminal moments of the half-shared bath, they had not.

_But if I do not think of it, all I remember is how I betrayed you when you were my brother. Now that you say you are not, then what binds you to me?_

Nothing, perhaps. With that thought his hands twitched in impotent regret. The more he thought of it, the darker his guilt drove his mood – for he blamed himself for this. For all of it, turning over that moment where he had decided to come to Jötunheimr in his mind over and over as if he might by some unknown magic take it back.

He remembered it so well: the fury of his coronation’s failure, and Loki watchful and pitying at his side. In that his words had said one thing, but his _eyes_ —

Thor did not falter in his stride, eyes resolutely forward as they walked onward. He would not give such any thought. In his heart he knew it to be unfair; he would not give that blame over where it was not deserved. Everything about this was his own damned fault and he had to learn to accept it as thus.

Helblindi left them at the entrance to their chambers; the heavy door swung closed, leaving them alone. Loki immediately strode to the closet, found it had been stocked again with clothes more or less in their size. His selections were made in silence – and then Thor saw he had done for him as well, as if he were a child who could not be trusted not to match armour with a lady’s petticoat.

“Is this it, then?” he asked, voice rough. “Is this how it will end?”

Loki frowned over a shirt, tossed it aside as he selected another and did not once look up. “Do not play the martyr, Thor. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Yes, and you are so much better at it than I besides.”

At that he turned, eyes narrowed to those of a cat upon the prowl. “I rather think I have more reason than you do claim that role,” he said, and though he spoke light there was clear warning wrought into every syllable. “Now be quiet, I need to think.”

“About what?” He spoke to his brother’s back, frustration rising. “Have you not made yet your decision?”

Loki would not turn again. “I will make it in my own time.”

“There is no more time!” Crossing the space between them, Thor caught Loki about his shoulders, turned him roughly about until they were but scant inches from one another. “Will you just leave me like this, until the last moment? So that I can be as surprised as the king when you tell him the fate of his abandoned child?”

“ _Stolen_ child, I should think.” He shook himself free, though he did not back down. “And you’ve always liked surprises, Thor. Not that it was any surprise to me when as children you always got the choicer pick of gifts and games and love.”

“They love you!” Impotent words, again; he was already faltering even as he forced himself onward. “Why else would they…”

“Keep me? Monster though I am?” He’d lost, and they both knew it. “Give it up, Thor. You are the last person in all the realms who could aid me in this.”

As Loki moved away, obviously intending to go to the bath chamber to refresh and to change, Thor spoke with the low broken whisper of a child left out in the cold. “I helped you before, didn’t I?”

Loki did not pause. “You were the only one there.”

“So it meant nothing to you?”

“I never realised you such a romantic.”

“Don’t _mock_ me.”

“Why not?” Loki came about one last time, his entire body seemingly alight with sudden fury. “This is all your damned fault!”

His own temper brought to terrible life words he had sworn not to give over to true thought, given venomous weight upon his tongue. “So you were not the one to encourage me on? To goad me into coming here to show my might?”

Shock rendered Loki motionless, eyes gone very wide. “What?”

“You have been encouraging me to one thing while saying the other since we were children, Loki. Did you truly think I never noticed?”

The depth of his surprise seemed to say that he did. Then it moved to scorn, and his laugh ricocheted from every frozen wall. “Then why did you do it?” he demanded, incredulous. “You obviously wanted to, for all you did was take my goading as simple justification.”

“Because I trusted you!” Though he wanted to catch him about the upper arms again, to shake sense into his words, Thor did not dare; it would be too easy to forget his strength in this, and he knew his brother hurt enough. “Because I always thought you did as much so I would feel it was my idea. You are always giving me your glory.”

“Not voluntarily.” Loki threw his hands upward, let them fall. “And I never give you anything. You just take. You take _everything_ from me.”

“Then what do you want of _me_?” The words were driven by all the force he could not allow his muscles to work, and he could not hold back the sudden misery that trailed them. “Tell me what I must do to fix this, and I shall do it!”

“There is nothing you can do.” Loki gathered his clothes, shook his head. “It is too late.”

“Do not be a fool.”

“I couldn’t possibly – that is your job, and I would never take it from you.”

Thor could manage no more than an incoherent roar, this time. The clothes scattered halfway across the room as he propelled Loki backward, slamming him hand against the wall at their path’s end. Pressing him there, he leaned close – and Loki laughed in his face.

“Would you take this from me, too?” Disgust and desire twisted his features in equal measure, his laughter sharpened like knives. “This last bastion of brotherhood between us?”

The thigh pressed between his legs jerked up, and Thor hissed to feel it press insistent and mocking against the hardness of his cock. Jerking forward from his waist, he gasped, sweat beading upon his brow. In truth he had not even realised – but then perhaps he had, for they were so close and his blood boiled high and even in the midst of their fight he had just wanted closer, just wanted _touch­_ —

“Do not dare,” Loki warned, and Thor chuckled low against the steady pulse of his throat.

“By your words I take everything.”

“And you think that permission?”

Drawing back Thor pressed hands about his jaw, leaving him nowhere else to look but directly into his face. Loki’s own features had become a mask of cold and pale fury – and as ever his hair remained perfect chaos about it.

“You are going to leave me,” he said, and though he’d aimed for fury he hit misery instead. Loki’s lips moved in false smile, shoulders arching to match.

“Not even the favoured son of Asgard can always have all that he might want,” he said in light mockery. “And what is it that you want? One last goodbye fuck? To take me in this form so you can use it to replace the image of me beneath you with alien cunt and crimson eyes?”

Thor choked on the quiet words. “I don’t want to live my life without you.”

“Ah, but it is only the life you were supposed to have had.” And whatever misery Loki himself felt was half-masked by his indifference. “We never should have been brothers.”

“Then what should we have been?” Terrible thought came to him, his cock again twitching at the promise of such illusion as he moved urgently forward. “You said yourself, perhaps Father had thought you worthy of—”

“Do not even go there,” he warned, one finger raised in denial. “I am not your whore, nor am I your wife.”

“Then what are you?” he asked, frustrated, and Loki laughed in a manner that sounded more like a shriek.

“The no-name lost child waiting to be found.” Bracing both hands against his chest, he pushed back. Hard. “Get off me.”

But when Thor did not wish to be moved, there was little Loki could do about it. Before he could muster any magic, Thor took the opportunity he already knew to be great mistake. But the thought of Loki slipping away before this could be taken, before this could be given – he thrust forward, crushed their lips together. He tasted different, in this; he gave no cool balm against dry skin, even before sharp teeth closed about his lip until he hissed, drew back.

“I said _get off me_.”

Ignoring the flash of eyes, Thor moved his hand down. There he found with unerring accuracy exactly what he sought; his fingers closed about the heat of a half-hardened cock. “You rouse to my touch.”

“The body and the mind are more distinct than you will ever know, so slaved is the latter to the former in your case.” Loki’s back remained to the wall, disdain shimmering across face to resonate in every word. “But my mind is in my control, for all my body is but a slave to simple pleasures.”

“Nothing about this is simple.”

Loki’s silence was no surrender, eyes searching. Then they flicked sideways to the great horologium, and he snorted. “We haven’t much time.”

But they stood in sudden stalemate, Loki unmoving against the wall. Thor swallowed, his voice broken blade. “ _Please_.”

Loki did not move at first. Then he turned his head, eyes closing. “Norns below, but you are pretty when you beg,” he muttered, and slipped free of his brother’s grasp before he called back over his shoulder: “Get in the bath, I will not do this when you are soaked in sweat and roaddust.”

Opening his mouth to protest, Thor was almost immediately struck to silence; Loki was already stripping his own clothes, leaving them in rough pile upon the floor. Then came the cocked eyebrow over one shoulder, and he slipped into the chamber with a pulsing laugh.

In that dim chamber Thor let sensation steal away all hope of sanity, hands slick with soap as they moved over curve and flat plain, fisting about cocks hard and leaking. It might have ended there, had Loki permitted it – but before matters could go so far a flick of one hand halted the water, and his brother dragged him from the steam to the chamber beyond.

He seemed different, almost, his hair straightened by the weight of the water that dripped from the dark ends. Pushing him down upon the bed, Loki straddled him with hands splayed across his chest, eyes intent upon his prize. Then they rose, caught in his hair like those of a bridle of a horse he had every intent to ride.

“This is your last chance,” he said, and Thor frowned.

“For what?”

“To say no.”

“No.” And deep amusement gave Thor’s words a silver sharpness that they did not often know. “Because I will always say yes.”

“Do not presume to play wordgames with _me_.” Slithering down his abdomen, Loki flicked that clever tongue into his navel. Thor half-rose with a gasp, but Loki shoved back. A moment later lips closed about his cock. Thor stiffened, and pushed back; Loki raised his head, tip of his tongue absent upon his lips as he raised an eyebrow in query. Thor swallowed hard.

“Do not do that.”

“Why? Because it belittles me to take your cock in my mouth?” Spreading his legs further, grinding down upon his groin until Thor groaned, he all but sing-songed his words. “Why so squeamish, brother, when I but fully intend to take it up my ass before this is done?”

“Do not speak this way.”

“Why not?” His mouth twisted in easy scorn. “Does it shame you, to fuck me in this way? Or does it bother you, that I should be so shamed by lifting my ass for your use?” His body stretched, muscles smooth beneath the white skin as he presented himself. “I do what I want, Thor.”

Uncertainty warred with the deeper desire to take that body for his own. “And you want this?”

“And I shall do it as best pleases me.” Each word gave bite to the sneer he wore. “Do not be so shocked, brother, I have no intention of making you my lesser. I am your shadow, I am your plaything, I only take the place that is mine—”

With no regard to pain or restraint, Thor shoved Loki over. As he toppled, he surrendered, and when Thor rose over him Loki raised a careless eyebrow, as if he were not trapped beneath the weight of his brother’s desire.

Thor ignored that; he knew when his brother sought to turn things to the way that best suited him. Closing a hand about the base of his cock, he leaned forward – and oh, his brother’s cock truly did shame his own, daunting in both girth and length. For a moment he thought this could not work. Then he gritted his teeth, relaxed his jaw, and pressed his lips to the weeping slit at its swollen head.

Loki’s hips arched in automatic welcome, even as his lips turned to instinctive mockery. “You have no skill in this,” he taunted, even as each syllable held the wrong meter, wrought tuneless by the skip of his breath. “You could not take it.”

Thor snarled. “ _Watch me_.”

“No.” And like a snake he wriggled, turned himself around so they lay in opposing directions. “I will best you at this,” he hissed, and closed his lips about Thor’s own.

Though Loki had greater practised skill, Thor had to think he’d made a miscalculation. While he’d had maidens and matrons alike do as much for him, he’d never done so himself. But he knew what pleasured him most, and as Loki’s clever tongue and lips worked upon him he recalled the actions with sharper clarity than mere memory. And he did the same, gave in turn, he hummed about the throbbing length. It was too much, yes, but the mere novelty that he would do this at all gave him distinct edge over even his brother’s clever tongue.

When he felt the first spasms of his release, Thor drew back, leaving glistening skin and the taste of salt; Loki hissed, letting Thor’s cock slip free, already speaking of cowardice when he came hard. Thor did not move, took it all. And Loki’s shock shivered through him, body stilled. Thor rose upon the bed, fingers moving over his face, his lips, revelling in the victory of Loki’s dazed expression. It could not last long; even as Thor licked evidence of victory from fingers, Loki’s eyes flashed dark.

“You have not won yet.”

The slender curves of his ass were dizzying invitation as Loki moved upon hand and knee to reach the backboard of the great bed they shared. Turning, shoulderblades pressed hard against it, Loki let his legs fall wide open – Thor felt the entire world tilt sideways as his eyes rested between them.

The sated cock lay there, heavy gratified weight; Loki gave a hiss as he pressed aside the oversensitised flesh. But then his fingers, glistening with quick seiðr, slipped down between his cheeks to spread himself wide. With a dull slam he thrust his head back, leaving his neck a white arch as pleasured keened from his pulsing throat. A twist of his slender wrist, and then they thrust in; his mouth opened in obscene circle, glistening and decadent, all sound from low in his throat rather than the now-lax tongue.

Whether it was given invitation or not, Thor surged forward. Base instinct drove his face between those legs, all spill and stiff bristle of beard. Loki’s hips jerked upward, his breath hissing pain at the rasp of beard upon overstimulated nerve, but Thor gave no quarter. Instead his fingers closed about wrist, pulled the questing fingers free of the worked ring of muscle that promised such pleasure. Then, Thor bowed to his worship, giving and taking both; the taste of him was musky and dark, spiced with the slight salt of his come. His tongue was not one for words, but it was a muscle as strong as any other as he drove it into his brother’s body, hands pressing down hard enough to bruise as he held Loki still for his ministrations.

When at last his pulled back, his cock felt an aching length pressing insistently against his abdomen, and even in the face of Loki’s fury there was nothing greater than his need. Loki sensed as much, snarled as he reached forward. The hand gripped him too hard, but Thor’s own snarl was half smile as Loki yanked him forward, pressed the weeping tip against the glistening hole. Thor glanced upward, caught only the ghost of a nod before he shoved in to the hilt.

All breath left Loki in a shriek, no words left. With low grunt Thor scrabbled at one hand as it fisted in the sheets and took the spasming fingers into his mouth. Wrapping tongue about them, he found them slick with Loki’s own spell-wrought lubricant and the taste of his body. Loki yanked them free, tangled them in his hair, and pulled him down for a kiss more teeth than tenderness. Thor surrendered all pretence of civilised thought then. All he felt was the need to press harder, to put himself inside him, to win a battle he didn’t even understand the reasons for. They fought, and he knew not why.

 _Because he wants it_ , he thought in half-formed image and fractured sensation. _Because **we** need it._

A chant, an incantation, sought to punctuate every hard thrust. It took what seemed an eternity for recognition to strike: Loki spoke his name like a spell. _Thor, Thor, Thor_. In return Thor gave silence, though only of words. Every thrust and every grind he accompanied with pant and grunt as animalistic as he felt. Slaved to sensation, he gave himself utterly, willingly, absolutely to the forbidden pleasure he found in his brother’s body.

Caught at the eye of that very storm Loki writhed beneath him with hands tangled in the sheets, chest thrusting upward in staccato rhythm, his hips locked down by Thor’s weight. He smiled, all teeth and the taste of promised blood – yet his lips were gentle when he lowered his word to whisper one word over the stuttering beat of his heart.

“ _Loki_.”

And he froze, gone still and silent. Thor nodded, tongue tasting salt upon that pale skin.

“I name you Loki.”

Surprise gave way to scorn, his laugh choking in a breathless throat. “Loki what? The Liesmith? The Silvertongue? False brother and never Odinson?”

“Loki,” he repeated, and came so hard it felt as if his entire body turned inside out. Shivering, feeling as if he’d fallen into some sort of peculiar dream from which he might never claw his way free of, Thor surrendered. “Loki,” he whispered again, and though he had already released he pressed deeper as if by sheer force of will he could become the same entity as the one he named over and again. “ _Loki_.”

Thor knew little enough magic of his own, whether by mind or incantation. But he felt the power of it then, when Loki surged as if filled with lightning even when Mjölnir had been denied him in this place. _He comes by my word_ , he thought, dizzied. And then it did not matter because his lips were over his and all he could taste and see and hear and feel and scent was the one named thus by Odin Allfather.

There was a hiss of pain on both sides when he pulled free. To his surprise Loki made no effort to return to the bathing chambers, curling instead like a sinuous serpent about him, holding him still. With eyes upon the crystalline patterns of the high ceiling, Thor drew him close. He had no idea as to whether Laufey knew what his guests had done in lieu of preparing themselves for meeting; he had no idea when they were even expected in his audience chamber. He closed his eyes anyway, felt his brother’s hands ghost over his face like cool water to cleanse his skin. Though he had no intention of sleeping, when he opened them again it was only to discover the sensation of time passed.

And Loki was gone.

“Brother?” he said, sitting bolt upright, the ambient temperature of the room chill upon his naked skin. But even as his eyes cast about in half panic, there came simple answer from the great window.

“I am here.”

When Thor joined him, he saw that the ice stretched out before them in endless sheets that might have been white under a brighter sky; here in Jötunheimr, they were instead a tainted blue, their darkened heavens like blackened bruise above their heads. Loki stood beneath that starless expanse, head tilted upward, and there was something…not _right_ about all of it. And not just because his clothes were all in order, and his hair slicked back and smooth from his high forehead after his most recent bath.

It suited him. That was what was wrong. Loki wore the ambience of Jötunheimr like a cloak tossed easily about narrow shoulders, and Thor could not help but think him cold, could not help but move forward and wrap his arms about his waist, burying his face in the space between neck and shoulder.

And Loki started, pulled away – but he had no-where to go. And he sighed, hands moving to Thor’s own as if they were a belt he had a mind to undo. “Brother, what are you doing?”

“Keeping you,” he whispered. One hand rose, though not because Loki had broken his hold. No, instead Thor’s hand rose to trace the palm over the rich curve from forehead to the base of his skull.

Then he reversed the motion and smiled even as Loki squawked immediate displeasure. Then he grasped his hip, turning him around. Loki’s expression was thunderous, hair displaced like arching lightning, now a black corona about his pale fury.

And Thor leaned forward to gift warm promise against his brother’s cool skin:

“I will never let you go.”

“It is not your choice.”

“I know.” It seemed such an impotent motion, that of a child who would not let the pleasant dream go even as dawn’s bright sun rendered all memory of it ephemeral and evanescent. He held tighter all the same. “But if you would but stay by my side…”

“We have word to take to the king.” Loki’s eyes held searching query, half narrowed. A moment later he slipped free, waved a hand towards the bathing chambers and the clothes he had laid out for him once more. “Dress, brother. Yet again, we have tarried long enough.”

“Loki.”

The memory of the last time Thor had spoken that name shivered down his spine, and Thor revelled in this new power even as Loki turned back, words bland in a way the aching hunger behind his eyes could never hope to be. “Trust me.”

“Are those words anyone should be fool enough to believe?”

“Not anyone.” The half-curve of his smile reminded Thor of the way the moons held so much potential in their waxing crescent. “They were meant only for you.”

Poets spoke of moments such as this, Thor thought – moments of change, where all hung in the balance and the simplest of choices held the weight of centuries yet to be lived. “I will never love another the way I do you,” he said, sudden, voice pitched half a tone higher than his wont. “Either as a brother, or as something so much more than that.”

In that, he had failed – for his stomach twisted to see his declaration met only with blank pity before Loki turned away. “Come, then,” he murmured, again indicating the clothes he had prepared for his brother. “We must ready ourselves.”

He bathed alone, dressed alone. In that he managed to regain something like equilibrium, emerging to find Loki standing before one of the mirrors with a deep scowl. His vain brother had always sought to maintain dignity in any defeat, though Thor could not hide his amusement to note that his drying hair had already defaulted to that most ridiculous of states. “Why do you not use magic to tame it?” he asked as Loki fought it still. A sudden creeping blush accompanied his next words. “You seemed able to conjure something slick enough to…when I…when we…”

Loki leaned closer to his reflection, snorted. “You will always be a fool, Odinson, whether I am there to goad you to it or not.” Apparently as satisfied as he thought possible, Loki turned and held a hand out. “Come.”

He dropped it as they crossed the threshold of the room and gave over to the guidance of the waiting page. The sense of loss it brought left Thor half-hollow – but not as much as the surer knowledge that he lingered but moments from the true loss of his other half.

When they were brought before the king, Thor followed Loki in a low bow before the throne of ice and winter. When they rose, neither brother averted their gaze but met Laufey-king’s evenly, as befit the station of the Princes of the Aesir. In that Thor stared at him, as cold and certain as the palace itself. He knew that if Laufey did not treat his brother with the respect his words had promised, there would be war waged before the messenger of such had even finished his tidings.

“So, you have both of you returned.” But those watchful eyes were for Loki alone when he spoke next, rumble of a resonant frequency with the ice itself. “And what word do you bring?”

“Your child is lost.”

Thor startled as if shot. Loki continued on, smooth as a dancer upon the very thinnest of ice.

“I met a tribe of hill bandits, and engaged them deep in the mountain ranges south of here. I did so in the name of your son, the unnamed one.” His eyes lowered in reverence, in apology as he gave over what his stance named dark news. “From the entrails they left, I divined his fate. They took him from the temple both as weregild, and as assurance of their own protection, as well as his. But in that, I fear, they failed him.” His eyes raised, dry and still. “They taught him nothing of his true self. And so it withered, and it died, and he passed from Jötunheimr with no name given by this land.”

Grief flickered through his eyes – but they remained watchful, searching. “I see,” he said, low curious drawl. “But how is it, that I felt him yet?”

“The dead can be unquiet for many years even after they have moved onward – and he never knew the life that might have been his. In that it surely cannot be strange to think he might linger longer than even most.”

Laufey curved forward, one arm braced upon the throne’s arm, long fingers dangling before his chest. “It is great tragedy that even now he shall not know that which should have been his.”

The dark head bowed low in acquiescence. “I am only sorry I could not bring you better tidings.” Then it rose again, something flicking free of his sleeve in sparkling gleam. “But I bring you this instead.”

Thor stared, even as Laufey’s lips quirked in something that might have been a smile. “Oh? And what have you brought me from my own land, Silvertongue Prince of the Aesir?”

Loki’s smile was perfect cut glass. “Water of the springs beneath the wandering peaks. It is said to bring warmth where there is cold.” Stepping forward, he went to one knee to make his offering. “Do not lament his loss, Laufey-king. I should think he has gone to a better place.”

Narrowing his eyes, Laufey accepted. “And you would know this?”

“He drank of these waters before he passed.” Regaining his feet in smooth rise, Loki stepped backward without once taking his gaze from the Jötnar king. “Can you not taste him?”

He raised the vial to his lips, eyes closed. Helblindi hissed in the darkness behind the throne, but Laufey paid it no heed. When he opened them, a faint dampness lurked at their corners, though his voice was glacial and still. “He should have been named. He should not have gone from this place without one.”

“Name him in your heart. It would be enough.” With hand pressed over his heart, Loki bowed low. “And now with your leave, we shall return to Asgard.”

He paused so long that Thor thought the game would end badly for them both. “Indeed you shall,” he said, finally. “We thank you for your assistance in this matter, and consider all debts repaid.”

Loki’s smile was as brilliant as the Asgardian sun. “You are most gracious, Laufey-king.”

This time both Thor and Loki bowed low, almost as one. They had nearly gained the great opened doors when Laufey’s voice rang out into the dim blue like a great half-smelted iron bell.

“Do you not wish to know his name?”

Thor ached to reach out – for Loki or for absent Mjölnir, he knew not which. But Loki turned back with a courtier’s easy grace, one eyebrow arched high. “I know my own,” he said, and gave a final bow as low as it was obsequious. “I think it enough, my king.”

Then he turned, arm crooked to Thor, who took it only as indication and not actual invitation. Loki strode the corridors here as if born to them, and oddly enough Thor struggled to keep to his pace; he was almost breathing hard when he managed to whisper his question.

“Do you think he knows?”

Loki’s eyes remained ever ahead, unreadable and steady. “I think perhaps he always knew.”

After that he would say no more. With an accompaniment of courtiers and the king himself, the brothers returned together to the Bifröst site. Thor gave up the call to Heimdall, and within a moment they twisted through its kaleidoscope back to the set of reality as they knew it. As the portal irised closed at their backs, banishing Jötunheimr to memory, in the observatory there stood father, and mother. Thor felt Loki stiffen beside him, and knew again this would be a moment upon which all could be broken.

And the Allfather bowed his head to them both, silver-glint in the golden light. “I welcome you home,” he said, low, “sons of Odin, envoys in the name of the throne of Asgard.”

And a moment later all protocol was thrown to winds and the storm; in her golden gown their mother rushed forward, casting her arms around them both like a net she had woven true herself. “Oh, my boys,” she whispered into first one neck, and then the other, lips pressed in word and kiss. “Oh, my foolish, _foolish_ boys – I am glad to have you home safe.”

It took some time and no small strength to tear themselves free; when they did, it was to find the Allfather before them. But for all the sternness of face and stance, his one eye held fierce pride – and perhaps, too, the slightest hint of resigned fear. “You have learned much in your time amongst the Jötnar, I should think.”

For the first time, Thor began to wonder if this had not been some elaborate plan on his father’s part, to reveal to Loki something he never could have taken easily, nor well. “Indeed,” he murmured, deeply unsure. To Thor’s concerned eye, his father’s broad and compact body bowed weary beneath the approach of the Odinsleep; it would have been gamble indeed, to send both sons away to such revelation when his own health and Asgard’s wellbeing hung in such precarious balance.

 _But only when everything is on the line can we behave as though we have nothing to lose._ And Thor frowned, even as he wondered if it truly mattered. His coronation had been a failure, but he knew now where his responsibilities lay as he pressed a hand upon his brother’s shoulder. Loki showed no reaction, only met the Allfather’s eyes with steady confidence, no sign of a waver in his voice as he spoke for himself.

 “We have learned much, yes – and I am weary with it, Father.” Thor could have shouted his relief to all the realms, to hear that world from Loki’s lips; a twisting pinch to his forearm kept him silent even as Loki added with smooth regret: “I would speak with you at some length as to our discoveries upon Jötunheimr, both of its culture and its history, but…not now. I…” He paused, looked down, the first faltering of this carefully crafted mask. “…tomorrow, perhaps.”

“Let us break our fast together, and then we shall have all the morning to ourselves.” A hand, gnarled and callused, laid first upon Loki’s shoulder, and then Thor’s, joining them in easy camaraderie. “As a family.”

And when Loki looked up, Thor did not think he imagined the sheen of tears over the green of his eyes. “I shall look forward to it.” With that, his strength failed him; he swayed, dipping dangerously close to a fall. Without thought Thor moved to catch him, cradling his head against his shoulder.

“Surely you wish to go reclaim your damned hammer,” he muttered, and Thor gave a low chuckling hum of agreement.

“Certainly – but it might wait a little longer, I feel.” With hand about his waist, Thor dropped his voice so that his words might be heard only by his brother. “I have been judged worthy of something far greater this day, and it is enough for me.”

“Idiot.”

His heart swelled with pleasure, and if he felt it in other places too it was something that could be dealt with another day. “Come, brother,” he said instead, hand moving in easy affection over the begrudged disaster of Loki’s hair, “let us return home, now.”

And for once in his life, Loki said nothing at all. Not even when Thor tangled his fingers in those dark snarls and held tight as he could. Everything that required saying lay in easy acquiescence upon his own still lips.

_Whatever you were, whatever you are, whatever you will be – you are mine, Loki, and I will never let you go._

But even as they approached the palace, Odinsons both, Thor caught the curve of his lips. In that he could not help but remember the silvertongue Loki had first been named all those years ago.

It was hardly the only name Asgard had bestowed upon its second son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...some part of me does wonder, really, if there shouldn't be a coda to this from Loki's POV. Then I remember that I worked myself up into such a state it's a miracle I even posted this. It's...perhaps not quite the swan song I ought to have chosen, but it will suffice. Sometimes you just know when it's time to lay down the pen, turn off the lights, close the door, and move on.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. It has been an amazing fandom to play at the edges of, and you are the people who made it so. <3


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